Mark of the Beast
by Born-Of-Elven-Blood
Summary: A mortal struggles with her guilt, a curse, and an impossible decision; a king watches from his golden throne and schemes; and a blue spider sits on its web and dreams in the dark of what it might become once it at long last devours its prey. Sequel to 'Feed the Rain'. [Loki x Jane]
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer**: The characters and original story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe do not belong to me; this story is not for sale or profit.

**A/N: **Welcome back for Part II! If you are finding me for the first time, this is a sequel to the story _**Feed the Rain.**_ This part of the story has a little bit of a different format to the first part. I wanted to keep the story completely from Jane's perspective, but I felt like I had to include something more to tell it right; please tell me what you think in your review! Thanks for sticking with the story, please enjoy Part II!

.

* * *

_**Mark of the Beast**_

* * *

"_**I'm searching for answers, 'cause something's not right.  
I follow the signs; I'm close to the fire.  
I fear that soon you'll reveal your dangerous mind…"**  
- Within Temptation_

_._

* * *

_In the high reaches of the World Tree, a king with one fierce eye reclined upon a golden throne. He cast his sight out into the far reaches of distant space, past whirling galaxies, bursting stars, streaming comets and all-consuming black holes, over strange and fantastic beings of every variety, ancient civilizations creating and discovering new wonders and mighty fleets of starship obliterating each other in interstellar battles. All of this he bypassed, searching farther and farther, only to pause upon a tiny blue speck in a quiet corner of the cosmos, making its steady, industrious way around a little yellow star. _

_Closer still he looked through air and light and misty clouds, until his gaze came to rest upon a winged metal tube gliding through the air above the planet's surface, filled with numerous insignificant mortal creatures going about their insignificant mortal lives. _

_Amongst them sat a woman upon whose whim the fate of all the Realms relied. In all the universe, it was she that drew the king's eye most constantly. _

_ The king sat forward on his golden throne, watching with unwavering fascination as the woman passed a hand over her troubled brow, lingering unconsciously over the invisible mark of magic that had been cut there. She stared out the window, her eyes filled with conflict and confusion. _

_She had a decision to make. And whether she understood it or not, the fate of worlds hung upon her choice._

"_Well, Jane?" the king whispered to the empty air. "What will you do?"_

_._

* * *

Jane stared out the tiny porthole at the glittering waves below. The sun struck the water at a sharp angle, and if she relaxed her eyes and let them go slightly out of focus, she could imagine she was seeing a spray of stars against a twilight sky. The illusion calmed her, just as staring into the real night sky always did. Right now, that whimsical fantasy was a lot easier and more pleasant to dwell on than the harsh, unbelievable revelations of the past two days. Or the encounter that was soon to come.

She pulled her hand away from her forehead, only to bring it down to massage her neck, where very recently a livid black bruise had stained her skin. The jar of ointment that had healed it without a trace pressed sharply into her thigh, but she refused to carry it anywhere but in her pocket; she would not risk parting with it. Or its runic riddle.

_Need. Gift. Healing._

They were more than mere ideas. They were the weights on a balance scale: one that continued to swing to and fro as she teetered between the two choices in front of her, embodied by a single symbol. _Uruz. _The beast. Or the rain.

War or peace. Truth, or lies. Conflict, or allegiance. Destruction, or healing. The sickness, or the cure.

The beast, or the rain.

Jane closed her eyes against the glittering stars on the waves. To choose what was right, she would have to do something very wrong. To do what she thought was right, was to choose the wrong thing. She had been chasing herself around in circles for hours. There seemed to be no answer.

Her mind flashed back to the dark of the hotel room, the storm and the green lightning, shocking revelations, the curiosity and the pain. The memory of the hand around her throat made her fingers flex tight against the arm rest. How could she ever trust him?

"_I would never hurt you…" _Those had been Loki's words, spoken like a solemn vow. Objectively speaking, she supposed he hadn't. Except…_"At least not more than I have to." _

Jane didn't like the idea of Loki deciding how much hurt she could endure, even if it was just a bruise. _It didn't feel like just a bruise… _The memory of the burning in her lungs and the blackening of her vision sent a tremor through her. _It wasn't the injury itself. It was the act. The fear, the helplessness, the violation… _

She reached up to touch the rune pendant, and swore he would never lay hands on her again.

On the heels of that, a sensory memory of the gentle friction of his lips rose up to swallow the crushing grip of his hand. Remembering the slide and press of his mouth on hers shot a confounding spark of electricity zinging along her limbs before she tamped down on it, vowing he would never do _that _again either, and refusing to acknowledge the curious shadow of ambivalence her resolution conjured. She could reluctantly admit, in the sanctuary of her own mind, that it had been… rather stimulating. For a moment. A _very brief _moment. But it hadn't felt _that _good – not good enough to overcome everything that stacked against it – and whatever good it had felt had been the product of adrenaline and fear… and maybe a little bit of curiosity… the conceit of being wanted so desperately… _nothing_ else.

It should never have happened in the first place. It would never happen again.

No matter what choices she made surrounding the golden sun in her pocket.

This was a distraction she couldn't afford now. She forced it to the back of her mind. Loki wanted an alliance between them. One that he apparently believed could make things right after all that had gone so wrong. One that would begin, she could only assume, with her silence, making her complicit in his deceit and creating a 'debt of loyalty', as the mysterious Alexa Solberg had put it.

Jane had already chosen once not to expose him, when she had failed to contact SHIELD while she was still in New York. But the real test was yet to come. Because at the end of this flight, Thor waited for her. And much as her own indecision disgusted her, she had yet to decide what she would do.

Loki's thinly veiled ultimatum echoed in her head.

"_Are you so eager to burn another world with me Jane?"_

She shivered. That message was clear enough. If she kept quiet and didn't stir up any trouble, there was a chance he'd do the same; if she told anyone that he was alive, and they came looking for him, he would defend himself. She had no idea what he might do, but there was zero doubt in her mind that he would do it. He would not be taken easily. Innocent people would get caught in the crossfire again. Lives would be lost.

_And this time, it really would be my fault…_

Jane hunched her shoulders, rubbing them in an attempt to drive away the cold that seemed to have invaded her bones. She thought she could feel the magic cut that marked her choice tingling on her forehead, so cold that it burned. The fine hairs on the back of her neck stood on end and her eyes darted furtively around the plane. There were moments she could swear she felt his eyes on her, watching her from some dark corner as he had last night, but no matter how often she looked around herself, he was nowhere in sight.

_He's not near me. He's inside me. __In my head..._

Jane squeezed her eyes shut as her forehead prickled and itched. She resisted the urge to scratch. She still had no idea what the mark really was, what it was for, or what it did. Alexa had told her that it was dangerous, but not necessarily evil; that it represented two possibilities, raging fire or cooling rain, the embodiment of the choice Loki was offering her. Loki himself had told her that it would protect her. And she'd seen with her own eyes that it was created with the Tesseract's blue magic, rather than the more common Asgardian green magic.

But it wasn't much to go on. What did 'dangerous' really mean? And as for protection… Jane dropped her hand to the rune pendant still hanging around her neck. _Hagalaz_ had taught her very effectively that protection could mean a lot of things, and those things weren't always what you might expect. As for the Tesseract, that was a complete wild card, it's only known properties being interstellar teleportation and unpredictable mind-altering effects.

"_It doesn't change you. It reveals you…" _Her fingers tightened on the rune pendant.

What if she touched the mark and Loki popped out, like a genie from a bottle? What if by scratching it, the mark thought that meant she was being harmed, and… and… _did _something. Something bad? Worst of all, what if it was influencing her thoughts and perceptions, and she didn't realize it? Loki had denied it, but what was Loki's word really worth?

The uncertainty was tying her in knots.

She _had_ to tell to Thor. Setting aside all of the conventional reasons why it was the right thing to do, there was a chance he would know what the mark was, and what to do about it. Despite Loki's warning, despite the devastation she could be responsible for if she revealed that he was alive, despite the way her insides squirmed with unease at the thought, and despite the pain it would cause him to learn that his brother was not the honorable hero he currently believed him to be, the only rational conclusion was to tell Thor what she knew.

_What part has rationality played in any of this? _

She shoved that thought forcefully aside.

If she were honest with herself, she also had another, more selfish motivation: trust. She and Thor had to be able to trust each other. Especially since she didn't know if she trusted him yet. He had broken so many promises. And with good – no, excellent reason each time. But the fact remained…

"_Thor divides his affections."_

Jane shook her head, as though she could shake off her doubts or somehow detach Loki's poisonous influence. Nothing he said regarding Thor could be trusted. Loki didn't want her to build a bond with Thor, he wanted her to build a bond with _him. _She couldn't allow that. She _wanted _to trust Thor, and someday she would. But in the meantime, she had to be trustworthy as well. She couldn't choose Loki over Thor, if she ever wanted to build something meaningful with him.

But then it came back to Loki's threat. If the charred, broken husk of Manhattan had been too heavy a burden, how could she bear the guilt of another city, another world, another crowd of innocent lives, whose blood this time really would be on her hands?

_If I keep quiet, I am his accomplice. If I tell, I am a murderer. Either way, he makes me complicit in his crimes. Either way, he ties us closer together…_

Maybe she could convince Thor not to go after Loki? She very nearly laughed at herself on the heels of that thought. Thor couldn't know of a wrong without trying to right it. It wasn't in him to ignore a crime, no matter the cost.

_Is it in me to do that? _she wondered. She didn't like to think so, but the real trouble wasn't so much that she ignored right and wrong, so much as she sometimes didn't quite know the difference. Like right now.

Thor would know the right thing to do instantly. He always knew just where he stood, just what he believed was right. An ache of longing blossomed in her chest and she sighed, longing to be in the sheltering strength of his arm, and simultaneously wishing that the plane would never land so she never had to make this decision.

"I can't, Loki," she murmured, letting her eyes go out of focus to stare out at the glittering lawn of the sea. She hardly knew which choice she was referring to. "I just can't…"

.

* * *

_ A guard in gleaming golden armor stood before the throne._

_ "What is your will, my king?"_

_ The king drew his eye from the little blue world and turned it intently at the faithful guard, seeming to weigh and measure him with his one wise, all-seeing eye._

_ "The threat I have seen on the horizon lingers just beyond my sight. Send the remainder of the forces to the outer perimeter. No living being shall enter or leave this realm, on pain of death."_

_ "As you say, so shall it be done, your majesty."_

_ The guard fisted his hand over his heart and departed to carry out the king's will._

_ The king sat back on his golden throne, his fingers tightening around the shaft of his mighty spear. His other hand drifted down to his side, into the folds of his cloak, where a tiny detonator was secreted, its wiring set to trigger a series of quantum explosives seeded along the perimeter of the Realm. Not near enough to destroy the Eternal City. Just enough to shatter the edges of the land mass and send them toppling into the void. _

_Along with every warrior in the realm, now stationed along the brink of the abyss. _

_In his mind's eye, the king pictured them falling, numerous as writhing golden raindrops, to meld without ripple or trace into the black chasm of the cosmic sea._

_ The king cast his eyes down upon the mortal goddess, and the mark upon her brow, carved with a double-edged dagger. The blade that would seal all their fates. His voice echoed hollowly in the empty chamber of the now empty palace and grounds. In his solitude, he allowed the command to take on the tone of the plea it truly was._

"_Do not make me do this, Jane." _

_._

* * *

"_Attention passengers_," the flight attendant's cool, overly-friendly voice came over the plane's intercom, pulling Jane from her fruitless thoughts. She was in the lavatory, splashing water on her face to clear her head, and had been staring into the little mirror for several minutes, lost in thought, as though maybe her dripping reflection might come to life and tell her what she should do. "_Please fasten your seatbelts, stow your tray tables and place your seat backs in their fully upright positions, as we are about to begin our descent_."

Jane's heart fluttered in her chest like a trapped bird.

She couldn't be the cause of more death and destruction.

She couldn't keep Loki's secret, building a tacit alliance with him while sacrificing Thor's trust.

She couldn't tell.

She had to tell.

Sighing heavily, she scrubbed at her face with a paper towel and exited the lavatory, squeezing past the other passengers making their way towards their seats. One of them, a middle-aged businessman wearing a blue blazer and a sour, harried expression clipped her shoulder as they passed, hard enough to spin her half way around.

"Watch where you're going," he snapped dismissively. "Ditzy bitch," he added in a gruff mutter.

On a normal day, that kind of thing would have irritated Jane, but she would have let it go. Today was not a normal day. The confusion and tension coalesced into a sizzling blaze low in her stomach, radiating up to coil, aching, behind her eyes. A quiet ringing started in her ears as she turned to glare at the man's back.

"_Excuse _me?" she all but growled between gritted teeth

The man stopped and turned, his lip curled, eyes hard, clearly spoiling for a fight and ready to put her in her place.

"I said…"

Jane watched through narrowed eyes as the words died on his lips and the color drained from his face. He stared at her for a heartbeat, then took an uncertain step backward, shaking his head and raising his hands in a gesture of surrender.

"Nothing," he said quickly. Jane frowned at him, her anger banking with confusion at his sudden change of tune. "Nothing. Sorry… sorry, ma'am," he shook his head, backing away. "Just… bad day... long flight… shouldn't have… sorry. Sorry."

He turned away and hurried up the aisle back to his seat. Jane watched him go, brow furrowing. Then she shook her head and moved back to her seat, fastening her seatbelt and relaxing as best she could into the headrest. She tried to hold on to her anger at the man in the blue blazer, preferring it to the helpless anxiety of her indecision, but it eked away as the ringing in her ears subsided. She had bigger problems to worry about than some jerk and his mood swings.

The more her anger evaporated, the more anxiety poured in to replace it, and as she stared out the window at the glittering water giving way to land, she let one quiet tear roll unimpeded down her cheek.

She couldn't tell.

She had to tell.

Her voice, when it issued from her lips, was a high thready whisper, and the words left her feeling like a frightened child.

"Don't make me do this, Loki."

.

* * *

_The king watched with baited breath as the woman stepped through the door of her small dwelling place, and into the arms of her Asgardian lover. His fingers curled and tightened around the arm of the throne as he watched them embrace, their delight in each other plain on their faces. When she reached up and pulled his mouth down to meet hers, the king turned his eyes away. _

"_I could almost believe you do it on purpose," he whispered to the empty air. He closed his glittering eye, shaking his head. "Is it ridiculous that I would rather you hate me than love him?" When he opened it again, a bitter smirk played along his lips, appearing quite unnatural upon his wise and stately visage. "But love and hate are two sides of the same coin. And given the correct pressure, that coin can be flipped."_

_Thus appeased, the king turned his gaze back upon the little blue speck, and upon the woman and her lover. No matter how cruelly she tormented him with the course of her affections, the moment on which all their worlds hinged was upon them, and he would watch without flinching._

"_Command me, my queen," the king murmured. His fingers found the detonator once more, resting, deceptively relaxed against the trigger. "I am ready."_

.

* * *

"I have missed you so, Jane," Thor sighed, cradling her face delicately in his hands. Jane craned her neck to stare up into the masculine beauty of his face, reaching up to cover his hands with her own and pressing her cheek into the rough strength of his fingers. He was dressed casually in a grey t-shirt and jeans, but that did nothing to disguise his otherworldly magnificence.

This was what she had been waiting for, longing for, desperate for: his towering nearness, his overwhelming presence, the wonderful simplicity of their feelings for each other, her mind quieting as he awakened her senses, the guiding hand that would lead her unwaveringly down the proper path, even if she couldn't see where she was stepping. It never failed…

So why wasn't it working?

The peace and happiness he always brought her was now no more than a brittle veneer over the swelling mass of confusion and painful uncertainty, like a boil that needed to be lanced. Her heart felt light, but her stomach was twisted in knots. She looked up into his smiling face, and all he happiness was shot through with fractures. She felt sick with guilt.

"How was your trip?"

She opened her mouth…

"It… it was…"

_Tell him. _Looking into his eyes, it was the only right answer._ Tell him!_

…then she closed it.

"_Don't look for me."_

Telling Thor was the right thing to do. He loved her and trusted her. He would have the answers she couldn't find. The benefits outweighed the risks by miles.

"_My only plans are to lay low. But if I am forced to change those plans…"_

There was no reason for her to believe Loki would keep his word. None. And she needed to build trust with Thor, not Loki; keeping Loki's secrets from Thor would be an absolute violation of that trust.

"_You will be the rain that cools his fury. Or you will be the fire that drives him to incinerate everything."_

From nowhere, that heart-rending smile, sad and knowing, flitted through her mind, and the taste of his lips accosted her memory without her permission. The feel of them, still so real all these hours later, made her skin tinge so brazenly that she could swear they were there even now, invisible but real.

"_You are my rain."_

Her chest constricted painfully. She cleared her throat.

"Um… it was…"

_Tell him!_

"…fine…"

_No, it was _not _fine! I was attacked by your dead brother, who it turns out is not so dead after all!_

"Kind of boring actually. Lots of teaching, like, really basic stuff to a bunch of politicians and soldiers."

_It was the opposite of boring! I got a magic symbol slashed into my forehead, and who knows what it does!_

"But I got to meet Tony Stark and Bruce Banner! They're, like, science geek celebrities, it was a pretty big deal…"

_I met the part-Asgardian descendents of the long lost brother you never knew existed!_

"But other than that… you know… it was just… um… fine…."

God, she was a bad liar. _Why am I lying to him? What is _wrong_ with me? _Guilt, hot and acidic, burned behind her eyes, and a heavy, uneasy knot in her gut twisted tighter. She dreaded finding a way to explain herself, since there was no way Thor would believe such a…

"I am pleased to hear it," Thor said, smiling warmly. Openly. Trustingly.

Jane discovered that the only thing worse than Thor discovering she'd lied to him, was Thor _not _discovering that she'd lied to him. The smoldering guilt in her gut blazed white hot. Unbearable.

"No…" she said, closing her eyes, swallowing against a bitter taste on her tongue. "Actually…"

_Careful…_

"…actually, it wasn't all fine…"

…_be very careful now…_

"Jane?" Thor's voice was laced with concern, and when she opened her eyes, his brow was deeply furrowed, his shoulders tense, as though braced to catch some heavy pronouncement about to fall from her lips. "What is it?"

"It's… about Loki."

.

* * *

_**TBC…**_

_**.**_

* * *

**A/N: **What do you think? Will she tell? Let me know your prediction in your review!

The runes referenced in this story are based on real runic meanings, but some aspects may be embellished or uniquely interpreted for the purposes of this story.

This series was inspired by an awesome fanart by Selene on Tumblr; there is a link on my profile page, please go take a look, you will be sorry if you miss it!

The song I listened to while writing this part of the story is the chillingly beautiful _A Dangerous Mind _by Within Temptation; your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go listen.

Any comments, critiques or questions are most welcome. Reviews make me write faster! Please let me know what you think and help me become a better writer!


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer**: The characters and original story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe do not belong to me; this story is not for sale or profit.

.

**A/N: **Sorry this took so long, busy times! Thanks to everyone who's left reviews, you guys are the best! Did your prediction come true? Let's find out!

.

* * *

"_**I fear your smile and the promise inside.  
It's in your eyes, what's on your mind.  
I fear your presence; I'm frozen inside."**  
-Within Temptation  
._

* * *

_The king sat forward in his golden seat, an uncommon energy stirring his regal form. His single eye was diamond hard, set in the grave lines of his ancient face, and his breath arrested in his chest. A fine tremor shook the hand that brushed the detonator at his side, the only outward sign of the maelstrom of anxious tension within. He lifted his finger away from the trigger. _

_Not yet. _

_The king had no desire to send the finest warriors in all the realms plunging to a senseless death. The Einherjar were his army, the mightiest he had ever commanded._

_But if Thor learned the truth, they would shortly become the army of his enemies. His own powers turned against him as the weapon of his defeat. He would not deliver that weapon willingly into the hands of those who would use it to destroy him; he would deliver them to the void first._

_But not yet. Not until she spoke the words that would damn them all. _

"_Jane… I believe in you." _

_Even so, his fingers twitched towards the trigger. Ever ready.  
._

* * *

"What?" Thor frowned, his shoulders tightening at the mention the name. "What about Loki?"

"He… he was…"

Jane took a deep breath. The moment had come.

She would tell him everything. She _had _to.

She opened her mouth, felt herself teetering on the edge of a precipice…

_"Are you so eager to burn another world with me, Jane?"_

… and, feeling like a coward, stepped back from it.

"It's just… being in New York… I… couldn't help thinking about him."

Not a lie. Not really. But not the truth either.

Thor pulled her into an embrace, making comforting noises that she didn't deserve. They rumbled in his chest, vibrating through her in a calming way that made her feel like wilting with guilt.

"Thor…" she said tentatively, pulling back to look up at him. It hadn't occurred to her to ask before the words were on the tip of her tongue, but as they left her mouth, she found that she needed to know. "What… what was he like? I mean… you know, _before_…"

_Before he lost his mind, betrayed you, and turned into a hostile alien invader bent on conquering planets and enslaving worlds. _

The words didn't need to be said; Thor understood her meaning. He looked down at her for a moment in consternation, clearly perplexed by the turn their reunion had taken. But ultimately unconcerned. It was plain as day that didn't suspect a thing. And how could he? Jane wanted to hide under a rock.

He pulled away from her, but his hand found hers, and he drew her farther into the flat. They sat down on the couch, Thor staring off into the middle distance, and Jane watching him, hawk-like, while he descended into memory.

"How do I explain Loki?" he said. A small, wistful smile quirked his lips. "Mere words may not suffice. In so many ways he was a mass of contradictions."

He shook his head, still smiling but troubled, as though mystified by the man he was seeing in his memories, and only just realizing it.

"He was… elegant and a bit vain, but unafraid of getting his hands dirty. Reserved, but obsessively curious. Manipulative, but honest about his own dishonesty; unashamed of it, I would say. He was quiet, observant, but never shy. Uncertain at times, but unafraid – Loki was no coward. He was devious, but loyal to those he loved. He was the kind to betray you for your own good, and then make a joke when you were forced to admit he'd been right to do it. He was practical, but took pride in artistry and irony. He loved competition, be it against another, or against himself, but he never sought glory for its own sake. It was the love of the challenge that drove him. And… there was a sort of grudging kindness in him, as though he thought it a weakness, but could not help it. And he was never cruel… not then."

Thor looked down, and had to clear his throat before he continued.

"He was thoughtful. Intelligent. Witty. Passionate about whatever took his interest. He loved books the way I love weapons and warcraft. And he was second to none in magical skill."

Thor chuckled at some distant memory, his eyes sparkling with thoughtful fondness.

"And he loved to play tricks on people. My mother used to say his one true talent was making people furious with him. I disagreed. His real talent was not for getting into trouble, but rather for getting out of it. My friends and I used make all sorts of mischief throughout the Nine Realms in our younger days, but there was no situation, no matter how dire, that Loki could not talk our way out of. His eloquence was unmatched, and he could be devastatingly charming. Many a lady traded her virtue to his silver tongue," he chuckled. "And to the golden trinkets he used to shape with magic for them. He was quite the craftsman, and quite well known for it; you could pick out all of his conquests at court by the jewelry they wore. It was quite the scandal for a time, but after tempers had cooled for a few centuries, it became something of an inside joke amongst the ladies, that Loki's love was like a goldfly – er, an insect on Asgard, similar to Midgardian fireflies, except that they are golden in color. The saying went that you could catch Prince Loki's attention, but you couldn't keep it, because it died after one night, and left only a bit of gold behind."

_Oh really… _Thor seemed to be genuinely enjoying his reminiscence, so he did not notice Jane's eyebrows shoot up her forehead at that anecdote. The beautifully crafted gold disc suddenly felt intensely conspicuous inside her pocket, and she furitively brushed her hand over the bulge to make sure no edge was sticking out to be spotted. _Playboy… _she thought sullenly, then frowned inwardly at her own petulance. _It's not like it really matters… at least I told him that I knew he wasn't serious, so he won't think I'm blind enough to become another dew-eyed conquest …_

_Not the point, dummy. Focus. _

Thor was still talking, revealing more than Jane ever imagined she might learn. He sobered, the weight of his loss revealing itself on his expressive face as he went on.

"He adored our mother, and she him. And I think he desperately wanted Father to be proud of him. But… he never felt he measured up." Thor's face drew in, shuttering with quiet grief. "He knew just how to make me laugh, and how to comfort me or calm me when I was in a rage or a sulk. He was mischievous, but responsible in ways I never was. Ambitious, but unpretentious." Thor shrugged and shook his head, still at a loss. "He was all conflicting truths, but all those truths met in him somehow and… There was no one in all the realms like him. He was just… Loki."

Jane made herself meet his heartbroken gaze, at a loss herself. The memory he described was no doubt skewed, the loss of his brother and the means of their parting making him remember the good and gloss over the bad in his own mind. But if even half of it were true, the man he described sounded like a perfect stranger to the one that had assaulted her in her hotel room and burned Manhattan to the ground.

What had happened to change him so drastically?

"_The universe is… unkind. It finds creative ways to make you suffer…"_

Jane shivered, her gut coiling tightly with the vague threat of whatever unspoken horror he had been referring to.

"I truly believe he never wanted the throne. Not before…" Thor continued, utterly lost now in his soliloquy. "As I said, he never craved glory for himself as an object, only as a means to an end; he wanted to be what our father thought a prince of Asgard should be. He both detested and relished his own uniqueness, always seemed just a little bit annoyed or amused by turns at the difference in his nature… or he did, before he knew how truly different he was from the rest of us…"

"What do you mean?" Jane asked distractedly, working hard to assimilate everything he told her into the image she had formed of Loki in her mind. "Why was he so different?"

"That's right, I never told you…" Thor sighed. "Loki was… not my brother by birth."

"What?" That caught Jane's attention. "You mean... like, he was adopted?"

Thor nodded reluctantly, his mouth tensing with unease.

"His parents… were Jotuns. He was raised a son of Asgard, but in truth, he was the son of Laufey, the king of the Frost Giants."

_A Frost Giant… _Jane blinked several times, an image of Loki filling her mind beside the image of a Frost Giant she'd seen depicted in a painting on Asgard. Trying to mesh the two images was like trying to hammer a round peg into a square hole. Thinking of him in those terms caused a paradigm shift, made him seem even more alien in her mind… but at the same time, it somehow made his alien-ness make more sense. He seemed so much different from anyone else she'd ever met, because he _was _different from anyone else she'd ever met. This new piece of the puzzle somehow made his incongruities easier to swallow.

"Not very tall…" she murmured, her brain whirling. "I mean… he was really tall," she amended at Thor's questioning look. "But he's not exactly big enough to be called a giant."

Thor chuckled at her rambling, casting her a grateful look of subdued amusement, as though he assumed she was acting silly to distract him from his sorrows. Jane didn't know whether to cringe at her own incoherence, or be glad he was giving her so much more credit than she deserved.

"He was indeed small for a giant. My father found him abandoned in the great temple upon Jotunheim, and brought him home to raise as his own son. But… he never told any of us. For over a thousand years, only he and my mother knew the truth." He sighed heavily, his brow furrowing with the burden of heavy thoughts. "And rightly so, I now believe. The Jotuns have been our sworn enemies since before the time of the Great Beginning. No one would have treated Loki as a person, much less as a prince, if they had known the truth. We were taught from infancy that Jotuns are savages and monsters. We have been trained to fight and kill them since we were old enough to hold a blade." Thor shook his head and looked away. "When Loki found out what he was… I cannot imagine…"

Jane thought maybe she could imagine, but only in a vague, abstract way.

She thought about how she felt when she'd realized Loki's mark had been on her forehead all along, and she'd never known it. The sense of intrusion, invasion, uncertainty and powerlessness had chilled her on a primal level. The intimacy of knowing one's own body should be sacrosanct.

How much worse would it be to find out that it wasn't just a little patch of skin, but instead it was her entire body that was not what it seemed? Not just for a few weeks, but for her entire life? And not only that she wasn't human, but that she was a creature she'd been taught from infancy to fear and despise?

"…_ice bound savages… a planet full of monsters…"_

What would that do to a person?

"That is why I was able to forgive him for killing me in New Mexico, and for all else he did while I was banished. The horror of that knowledge had overthrown his senses." Thor looked down at his hands where they rested in his lap. "He said he could no longer recall anything of our lives on Asgard but living in my shadow. I can only assume those shadows swallowed him up…"

Jane reached out and laid a tentative hand on his forearm, squeezing gently in a gesture of support. She wished she could brush her hand over his brow and smooth away all his sorrows. He wasn't meant to look so morose. He had a mind and body made for either uncomplicated happiness or righteous anger. Sadness didn't fit on his face.

But… she was on a mission. This wasn't just curiosity, this was data collection. She remembered their first meeting, when she'd disregarded his deranged, incoherent ramblings in favor of recording the scientific data of the Bifrost site. What was a stranger's head injury, compared to soil samples from the site of a gravimetric disturbance of that magnitude? A belated guilt twisted through her like a pinch deep in her chest, sparking the beginnings of a tension headache behind her eyes, and for an instant she thought she heard a quiet ringing in her ears, though it was gone quickly. Now, as then, she found herself putting her search for knowledge before his well-being. She needed to know these right now. More than she needed to spare him this pain.

For what felt like the millionth time, she wondered if she were heartless.

"If he were still alive…" she said quietly, her mind carefully shuffling aside her feelings of self-castigation and pouring over this strange, intriguing new Loki, that Thor assured her had once been the same Loki that had leveled Manhattan. "If it were possible… would he still be worth saving?"

Thor looked up at her sharply, his eyes hauntingly sad, and she was suddenly struck by the years she saw reflected in them – it was easy to forget sometimes how old he really was. Moments like these simultaneously made her feel incredibly fortunate and incredibly insignificant.

"When I took him from his cell on Asgard, I told him that I no longer believed that my brother was alive inside of him. But when I held him in my arms on Svartalfheim… when his life was flowing out of him, and I was powerless to stop it… I realized in that moment, too late, that something in me would always call him brother. Was he worth saving?" Thor shook his head. Then nodded decisively. The sincerity in his face, made somehow more profound by the display of timeless knowing in his eyes, struck her hard in the chest and stole her breath. "Yes."

"Yes?" she heard herself ask faintly.

"I do not know if he could have been saved," Thor went on, nodding his head minutely as he spoke, as though confirming his own words to himself. "And many might say they disagree. But in spite of everything, he was my brother. Nothing can change that. Nor would I have it change. It doesn't matter if it was impossible. I would never have stopped trying."

It was Jane's turn to look away, her mind racing. She shifted, the disc in her pocket digging into her hip. Suddenly, the symbols of the healing sun, the need to be filled, and the gift that breeds loyalty, all took on new facets of meaning.

Loki believed there could be healing. And she could be a part of it.

Thor could have his beloved brother back. She could help give that to him.

But not if she told him what she knew. In fact, if she told him now, Thor would likely be forced to fight the brother he loved and missed so much. And she would be to blame.

In that moment, all her worry and vacillating and rationalizing came to nothing, because the answer was clear to her. She didn't know if it was the right one, but she knew it was the one she would choose.

_Not for Loki! For Thor! _

The distinction comforted her, even though she knew it really didn't make any difference. The lie was the same. As was the outcome.

The moment for honesty was gone. Loki's secret would stay secret. _For now. _There was no way she could trust him, but she would listen to what he had to say. _If he'd just stop being so obscure… _All this symbolic language, riddling in runes, a trail of breadcrumbs leading her from clue to clue as though she were deciphering a treasure map… it was, she again admitted grudgingly to herself, rather intriguing, but it was getting her nowhere and it made her anxious. Afraid even. He was treating this like a game, even though the consequences were deadly serious…

Mischievous, practical, creative, intelligent, challenging… The man Thor had described abruptly clicked with the man she had encountered in unexpected and disorienting ways. A link forged in an instant, joining the man worth saving, with the man she might have a chance to help save…

She would listen. But he was going to have to do more than smooth-talk her with that supposed silver tongue if he expected her help.

"I am sorry, Jane, I understand your curiosity, but may we speak of something else now?" Thor asked dully. "This sorrow still weighs heavily on me."

Jane shook off her musings. There was no point in chewing on them further. The choice was made. It was his move now. And she'd tortured Thor enough for one day.

"I'm sorry," she sighed, rubbing a guilty hand over her brow, unable to quite look at him as her conscience at last caught up with her curiosity. "Of course this is hard for you. I can't believe how selfish I'm being."

Thor shook his head, taking her hand in his and tracing her fingers with his own, as though it were some fascinating and delicate relic.

"No, think nothing of it. It was merely unexpected." He smiled more warmly at her, his tone deepening with as his eyes grew intent. "I am simply happy to have you back. I would endure much worse to have you in my arms."

Jane felt her cheeks heat, and she tilted her head, giving Thor a coy, sidelong look before she reached for him. Thor's expression swiftly morphed into something intent and intimate as he allowed himself to be drawn down into a passionate kiss. The world spun slightly and the indistinct ringing in her ears spiked momentarily as he pushed her gently down onto her back. A baseless sense of unease twisted low in her abdomen alongside her desire, nagging at her. Her decision was made, and it felt like the right one. So why did she still feel so restless? So wrong?

But Thor's lips, teasing at her neck and moving ever lower, drew her attention inescapably, and Jane sighed and melted against him, letting her lingering doubts slough away under the electrifying onslaught of his touch.  
.

* * *

_The king turned his eye away, having absolutely no desire to see what came next. With a soft, controlled sigh, he lifted his finger carefully from the detonator and let it fall back into the folds of his cloak, blessedly unnecessary. For now. But still within reach, should the need arise. And it might yet. Whether she knew it or not, his beloved mortal was not finished choosing. And he would do what he must._

_Jealousy burned like the fires of Muspelheim deep in the pit of his being to imagine his chosen queen in the arms of her lover even now, but in spite of it all, his heart was lighter than it had ever been since his brother's ill-fated coronation day. _

_Of her own will, the mortal goddess had taken the first step towards him. It had been a delightful surprise when she had asked to know about him. She had listened intently, her magnificent mind working hard. He would have given much to know what she made of all she'd learned. She had not, at least, recoiled or displayed disgust to learn his true species. Though he had taken note, where her lover had not, of her annoyance at the mention of his romances._

"_Jealous, Jane?" the king murmured under his breath, allowing a whisper of a smirk to play on his lips. He didn't really believe it, but it was a nice fantasy._

_Nearly as nice as the reality: that she had kept his secret._

_He could feel each moment of this truth washing over him in little drops of time – crystal drops, cool and cleansing. Rain. Relief. Strength. Control… _

_It was only the first choice she would have to make. It was a battle won, not the war. But this time she had chosen him._

"_Someday I will crown you in stars, my Jane, if only you will let me…"_

_Restless and wanting distraction, the king rose from his golden seat and strode from the golden hall. He swept through the vaulted marble passages and soaring ivory archways. Guards and courtiers stood to attention or bowed at his passing; none questioned or hindered him. To all that looked upon him, he was king. The thrill of it was still delicious. And yet at the same time it was but a feeble stopgap – a false victory. For all practical purposes, Odin Allfather was still king of the Realm Eternal; it mattered little who wore his face. And without his beloved here beside him, the charade wore thin. Someday, if the gods, and his mortal goddess, were kind, walk these halls free in his accustomed form - though not his natural one, never that – and be called a king for it. Until then, the secret knowledge that he had them all dancing like mummers in the palm of his hand, and none of them any the wiser, would have to be enough. And it would suffice; despite his regal majesty, the king enjoyed nothing quite like a well played trick._

_His purposeful stride carried him at last to the grand balcony overlooking the approach to the palace. From here, the entire realm spread out before him, seeming to roll away like a fertile field of grain, gilded in the last fiery arrows of sunset. The light streamed like liquid gold, radiating and refracting over the architecture of blade sharp angles, flowing arches, glittering spires and undulating folds in patterns long burned into the king's memory. _

_His eyelid drooped as he savored the breeze blowing inland off of the edge waters glittering in the distance. The evening air smelled of water and wood smoke, and spice and stone, and apple blossoms and baking bread. Amidst the artwork of the cityscape moved the realm's inhabitants, even the simplest of which showed himself graceful, cheerful, beautiful and bold. Their every interaction and activity proved a study and testament to their innate majesty and superiority as a people. _

_The king let his eye focus as it traversed the city streets from afar, his mind stretching lazily back into the distant past, picking out memories from each place his gaze alighted like bright jewels winking at him out of the misty haze of time. _

_There was the tower where, as a boy, he had once climbed, on a dare, to the very pinnacle without using any magic. He had tied his mother's silk scarf to the needle-slender tip of the spire at the top to prove he'd made it. He had not been allowed to play out of doors for a fortnight afterward, but for months he was a hero amongst his peers._

_There was the broad lane where they had raced their horses between lessons, before the market place had expanded into that section of the city. Thor had had the audacity to demand that a law be made to clear the street for two hours each day so that they might continue as they always had; it was one of the few instances in his long life when he had to remember the meaning of the word "no"._

_There was the tavern where he'd drunk and played dice long into the night with the ambassador from __Nidavellir, softening his will of iron with clever words and strong mead, and in the end sealing the last of the Seven Treaties__, though no history scroll would tell ever it that way._

_There was the courtyard between the old temple and the guard tower where a pretty girl named Sigyn had given him his first kiss. He'd been enchanted by her dark eyes, and had given her a gift – a bracelet he'd made of gold and garnet during his magic lesson – and she had rewarded him for it. A fleeting liaison in the grand scheme, though at the time he'd convinced himself, as all young people do, that his first love was greater than any that had ever been, and that it would last until the all the stars died. Little could he have known then what he knew now, or that it would be a thousand years before he learned how deeply love could cut, and that it was the depth of peace, not excitement, that was a truer measure of love's strength… _

_There was the bridge where he and his brother had warred with and slain the Valorian water wyrm that had been sinking the fishing boats at the mouth of the Silver River. They still sang songs about that battle on the docks._

_There was the rooftop alcove from which he'd played his most infamous trick on his brother's friends; it had been over five hundred years, and the Lady Sif was still holding a grudge over what he'd done to her hair. And they called him vain._

_There was the old fire oak, where he'd spent countless hours in the sun dappled shade, reading, dozing, practicing his magic, or just daydreaming._

_A thousand moments in a thousand places, all running together so that the city was overrun in the mind's eye with a thousand young kings crafting a thousand precious memories into a tower of shivering sugar glass. Too fragile to endure. Destined to shatter._

"We were raised together. We played together. We fought together. Do you remember none of that?"

_The king had walked these city streets, called this golden palace home, and known these high born people as his kindred and subjects for many an age and countless generations of mortal men. Yet he had never seen them as he saw them now. _

_For so long, these memories of uncomplicated happiness had been like shards of splintered stone in his flesh, piercing him with the searing agony of betrayal. Yet ever since he had held his beloved in his arms for that one brief, blessed instant as the Aether detonated – close enough, to his eternal shame, to forge a connection of blue fire between them - something in him had twisted to a disconcerting new angle. Despite the danger, her brightness drove back the shadows, and in her healing light, the sting pain of his connection to this place had become bittersweet rather than torturous. The shards of memory were ground into sand, and he discovered that they softened with the grinding; each grain of sand a memory, neither lost nor destroyed, but transformed. They could never be what they were. But they remained, and something new might yet be made from them. Sheltered in her radiance, he slowly discovered that he could once again glance towards those distant, happy lights of the past without constantly shedding tears and screams and other peoples' blood for them. _

_He would never be what he once was, that stood beyond a shadow of a doubt, and this place would never be what it had been to him. But there were moments his heart physically ached with longing for this shining oasis in the black, hateful putrescence of the void. He wanted to belong here again, truly, unabashedly and legitimately._

_And though he hardly understood his own weakness on the matter, he found he wanted to offer it to his beloved, not as a thief with a stolen treasure, but as a rightful king to his queen. It was hardly necessary. Circumstance, ill-luck and cunning had conspired to provide her with surer protection than even queenship of the Realm Eternal could endow. And she was not the sort of creature to be won with honors and jewels. No, it was far less practical than that. It was, perhaps, a matter of pride. The perverse desire he had developed for her fear and submission while his mind had been enslaved in blue fire faded more and more with each passing day and each new link of control he forged over the silken strands still clinging irascibly and irrevocably to his mind. More and more he discovered that he wanted to see pride in her eyes when she looked at him. Admiration. Welcome. Desire. _

_To achieve that, it was no longer enough to simply possess and rule_ _this place; ever since he had protected _her_, he found he had developed a disconcerting and inconvenient need to protect _it_ as well. _

_He shifted his weight from foot to foot, testing his balance in constant reminder of this unaccustomed form, and felt the slight weight of the detonator still concealed in his cloak sway against the armor of his leg. He lifted his eyes momentarily from he landscape to stare out into the oncoming night beyond the edge waters, out into the black pit of emptiness between the wink of the stars. For a dizzying moment, he thought he felt it staring back. He was the first to look away. _

_Asgard's king would protect it. Even if it meant destroying it in the process._

"_For her."_

_For her, because that was the only way he could trust himself to do what was right. He could not count on any other motivation to remain uncorrupted. The blue fire no longer ruled him. But he could not trust himself without her light to guide him._

_Unbidden, his imagination stabbed at him with an image of his mortal, moaning and panting beneath her straining lover. His bright, dark eye flashed pale blue for an instant, and a chunk of the marble railing cracked and crumbled with the force of his fist tightening around it, rage and helplessness and acidic jealousy boiling in his blood for a long, precarious instant before he mastered himself once more. He cast aside the jagged chunks of marble in frustration and disgust. _

_Whatever she was doing right now… didn't bear consideration. There was time, and given enough of it, anything could change. Her choice this day gave him hope. And the mark on her brow would be what sealed it. She would come around with time… and maybe some subtle direction... She would find her way to the right choice. She had to. None of these thoughts, memories or plans mattered if she did not. He had only come to this new peace through her. She was the anchor around which he drifted, the beacon that had led him back home, the rock that had steadied him and given him strength when his world was shaken to its very foundations, and the rain that had purified his tainted mind and washed him clean enough to touch this little island of light again without crushing it. _

_If she was gone, he would be lost again. _

_He was born a monster, raised a failure, and exiled, a vagabond and a slave. In a universe filled with abyssal darkness, she was the only star. If she made the wrong choice, and decided against him, nothing in all the worlds would hold any meaning except for his emptiness. Without her, all the universe could burn and nothing of value would be lost. If she could not accept him, he would reject all else._

_The evening bells began to ring as the last rays of the sun slipped beyond the edge waters, casting a undulating rainbow aurora against the sky for a few brief moments as its rays refracted through the mists of the falls. The haunting chime of the bells seemed to ring through the sound and meld with it, giving brief, glorious life to a new sense that was both sight and sound. The people all paused, as was customary, to glance skyward at the twisting cascade of light and color, but they quickly went on with their business. After all, it happened every day; there would always be tomorrow to marvel at it._

_The king alone in all the realm stopped to truly absorb the wonder, beauty and worth of the land in which he stood, with an appreciation that only deprivation could breed. That powerful desire accosted him once more, to stand amongst these people as himself, and gaze up at the sky at sunset as one of them, and revel in the luxury of taking it for granted. Would he ever be allowed again?_

_The king smiled with cynical mirth. That decision was yet to be made. _

"_Uncomfortably touching as that soliloquy may have been, brother," he murmured, "you do not decide whether I am worthy of redemption. She does."_

_If she could find a hero in him, perhaps he could be heroic. If she decided there was only villainy in him, he would be play villain with relish. But before she could choose his fate… she had to choose her own. _

_He shuddered, his hard eye sliding closed for a moment as a chill stole through his bones, and the flicker of blue fire cast a long shadow across his memory for an instant. The choice was something that could not be taught. He had done all he could to guide her to it. She would have to find the rest inside herself._

_His eye opened once more, and traced the skyline with a covetous longing gone hollow with worry. Even his longing for his childhood homeland could not outweigh her power over him. The fate she chose - for herself or for him, the difference was negligible - was the fate she chose for all. He would save this little island of light from the darkness waiting beyond the edge of night, or he would sink it beyond even the reach of darkness, and as on Midgard, all that he did, he did for her._

"_Choose carefully, Jane__," he murmured softly to the evening breeze as the aurora descended into dusk. "Asgard lives or dies by your will."_

.

* * *

**TBC…**

* * *

**A/N: **"_We shall not cease from exploration__, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."_ [-TS Eliot] I feel like that pretty thoroughly sums up how Loki feels about Asgard now. He sees something he wants to protect as well as rule.

So this was lots of character development, not a ton of plot advancement, but kind of necessary if Loki is to be the dynamic character I want him to be. Jane is still the main protagonist, but Loki needs to grow too! Hopefully this chapter was as much fun to read as it was to write – which was rather a lot.

Let me know what you think in your review! You cannot imagine how appreciated they are. And helpful! The muse is a lazy little drunk that needs constant motivation, and your feedback is just the push he needs to get his monkey tail in gear. Without them, I have to resort to caffeine and a cattle prod, and it's just not conducive to a productive working relationship.


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer**: The characters and original story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe do not belong to me; this story is not for sale or profit.

**A/N: **And we're back! Thanks to everyone who has reviewed! I've gotten such great feedback, insightful feedback, it has really been such a help! Thanks for sticking with the story so far, and thanks for waiting! This chapter and the next two chapters all kind of go together; they were originally one great big monster chapter, but it was way too long, so it got split in three. I have been fussing with them (read: wailing on them with a sledgehammer) for a while now, and I still don't think I have all the dents out of them (in fact, I probably inflicted some new ones), yet I don't know what more I would change, so we're going to roll with it! I'm hoping I've conveyed Jane's situation and internal struggle satisfactorily; that's where you come in! Please continue to let me know your thoughts! Comments and critiques are always welcome and appreciated, and they really do help me become a better writer!

Lots going on in the next few days IRL, but _hopefully_ the next two chapters will be up within the week. Thanks again for reading! Enjoy!

PS - this is chapter 3, mark 2, I noticed a couple of mistakes, so I re-upped it! _Now_ enjoy! ^^  
.

* * *

"_**This is what it looks like when someone's fighting for his soul." –**__ Jim Butcher  
._

* * *

It is a curious phenomenon embodied in the adage, 'the more things change, the more they stay the same'. Jane remembered hearing her grandmother say it when she was very young, and it had stuck with her because she had not understood it at the time. Now, she was learning all too well what it meant. Days went by. Nothing happened. Or rather, everything went on happening just as it should, even though Jane felt like the world should have come to a crashing halt in the wake of all that had occurred. Somehow the world kept turning, and it insisted on dragging Jane along with it.

She received a courteous but generic letter of appreciation from Stark Industries, thanking her for her services and informing her that they would contact her if they had any further need; basically a kiss-off, telling her that she would not be included in any further SHIELD scheming for, which was more than fine with her. She had enough to worry about without wondering if Big Brother was monitoring her every move. Not to mention, she had her own research to think of.

And she did try to think of it. She thought about the Convergence and the Foster Theory and the Bifrost, nee Einstein-Rosen Bridge. But in light of the current situation, her focus felt fuzzy around the edges, almost disjointed at times, and her mind kept wandering back to her late night encounter with Loki. As much as she wondered about her research, she wondered at least as much about where he was, what he was doing, how he had survived his injuries on the Dark World, and what he was plotting next.

But she did _try_ to think of her research. And the more she thought, the less sure she became that continuing her astrophysics projects was a smart idea. She was too anxious and distracted right now. This stuff was her life's work. She couldn't afford a slip up while her attention was divided. And she didn't want to think about starting in on anything that really mattered while she was waiting for her world to be turned upside down again.

Luckily, she had a project in mind to pass the time while she waited for Loki to get his act together. She gave herself precisely two days off to regain her equilibrium, and the third day found her at the flat her mother kept for when she was in London.

Dr. Nancy Foster, a world-renown neurosurgeon, was almost as obsessive about her research as Jane. She had access to state of the art laboratories around the world, that had not stopped her from having the back half of the upscale flat converted into a miniature research lab some years ago for use in some of her personal projects. Jane had appropriated the lab without anything like explicit permission when they had come to London following the trail of the gravimetric disturbances, and lived in a constant state of anxious hope that her mother wouldn't turn up at the door unannounced; the two of them seldom spoke, and even more seldom got along. It would prove extremely awkward to have to explain why she was currently using a number of her mother's human tissue samples to experiment with the Asgardian ointment.

Today, however, she might have welcomed her intrusion. It had been years since Jane had had to make a Gram stain slide, and it was slow going, not because the process was in any way difficult, but because she was having the worst trouble concentrating on even the simplest tasks.

The problem, she decided, was that her equilibrium hadn't returned; it seemed to have slipped farther through her fingers instead. Her resolution to consider Loki's allegiance had lifted her out of one purgatory, only to leave her swaying dangerously in another, plagued with uncertainty and mired in her own ignorance. The inexplicable restlessness and unease she'd felt after choosing to keep his secret from Thor continued to fester, spreading through her like an infection in her blood. A step forward in any direction felt like it could take her off the edge of a cliff. Even though she knew no one had any reason to suspect anything was wrong, she felt like she had a big scarlet letter branded on her forehead in place of _uruz_ – maybe an "L" for "liar". Of course, no one could see anything on her forehead to make them suspect; the magic made the mark invisible to one and all, even Thor. And the very fact that no one suspected anything was a constant, miserable wellspring of guilt, as well as a fault of instability.

The whole endeavor was a house of cards built on a foundation of sand, with the tide certain to come in at any moment. Her two day break had been spent dithering over every action and decision, wondering if she was acting normally, anxiously worrying that she would give something away, and getting the occasional odd look from everyone who knew her. There had been no time to seek her equilibrium amidst the constant worry, and the strain was only getting worse, not better.

_I decided that I would listen, and now he won't talk. Typical._

It couldn't go on this way; she knew that she had to carry on with her life. She would have to at least _act_ normally if she intended to keep her secrets and maintain her lies. Eventually, she would have to at least start going through the motions of her primary research, and it wasn't like there wasn't plenty for her to do, new ideas she wanted to explore, new theories to test, terabytes of new data to analyze. She hadn't planned on a break. And she hadn't planned on this… this haze of anxiety that seemed to arrest her at every turn.

_I didn't plan on any of this…_

There were a hundred different way she could proceed and a million different plans she could make. And Loki could show up at any moment to throw everything into chaos. Every time she tried to move forward, that truth reasserted itself to knock her back.

Forcing herself to refocus on the task at hand, Jane pushed aside the drying gram stains and glared sullenly at the creamy blob of enticingly apple-scented ointment in its golden container, vacillating over what to do with the remainder of it. The smart move would be to remove it from inside the golden disc and seal it up. It was an unknown chemical substance that had inexplicable properties she didn't fully – or even vaguely - understand. Carrying it around in a golden jar in her pocket begged so many risks – exposure, loss, degradation, contamination – that the idea of doing so was almost laughable.

And yet, the idea of removing the ointment from its golden jar, or parting with either component of the gift, made her even more uncomfortable. And the idea of leaving it here in the lab while she wasn't there to guard it smacked of leaving the Hope diamond in the relative safety of a piggy bank. She picked up the lid of the golden jar, studying the thread-fine filigree that swirled around the edges of the inlaid facets of the runes. It really was a stunning piece…

Rolling her eyes, disgusted with her own lack of scientific integrity, Jane pressed the lid of the jar back on, running her thumb absently over the rune for the sun, and slid the disc back into her jeans pocket. It didn't matter how unprofessional or detrimental to testing it might be; she would not part with the golden disc. She rubbed at her throbbing head, and giving it a shake in a futile hope it would dislodge whatever was making her ears ring so obnoxiously, and bent back over the slides, concentrating hard on adding just the right amount of dye to the sample.

.

* * *

_Unbeknownst to its bearer, the mark upon her forehead was glowing ever bluer, hidden well under its veil of magic. Its magic sizzled and quested forth, shining not just through the cut on her brow, but backwards into her mind. It skillfully singed her neurons, deftly reordering them one axon at a time. Strands of energy insubstantial and unbreakable as spider's silk tugged deftly at her subconscious, careful not to disturb her, though no touch could be delicate enough that she would feel nothing of the intrusive caress. _

_ Progress came slowly. The magic was twisted at strange angles, knotted in ways it had never meant to be tied, so that its leverage pushed at odd angles, and there was only so much force it could exert. But what it lacked in power, it made up in stamina, and in its quest it was tireless._

_With infinite care, the magic pulled her barriers apart. Carving a corridor through her brain. _

_A chute through which to pour a torrential flood from the skies. Or a tunnel through which even the most massive beast might burrow from deep inside the labyrinth of her inner world to the physical reality beyond the borders of her skull. _

_Not changing her. Never that. It was _her _that was wanted. If she were changed, she would no longer be what she was. Utterly unacceptable. It was _her _that was needed._

_So while the touch of the spider's silk disturbed, it remained gentle. Insidious. Taking inestimable care not to damage or rewrite._

_Only opening the gates of her mind. _

_Revealing her._

_._

* * *

When Thor wasn't with her, he was in Greenwich, helping with the rebuilding.

"Mjolnir is a tool to build, just as much as it is a weapon to destroy," he explained to Jane as they lay drowsing together in her bed one night. "My father bid me keep it, even though I have refused the throne. It is my duty to use it where I can. As I should." He stroked her hair absently as she ran her fingers lazily through the fine dusting of golden hair on his chiseled chest, her mood subdued by the topic of their discussion. "Besides, I am bound by honor to help rebuild what I helped destroy." He smiled softly, kissing the top of her head. "It is something I never understood before. But you taught me that, Jane."

Jane sighed and said nothing. Her head was starting to hurt. It had been hurting a lot recently, almost always accompanied by a quiet but distinctive ringing in her ears. She nuzzled her head into the crook of his arm and tried to relax so that it would abate. She hated watching him leave each day, knowing he would be so far away if she needed him. She never felt quite safe anymore when he wasn't nearby.

"…_Thor divides his affections…"_

Yet at the same time, what right did she have to complain? She understood all too well his desire to make things right. How could she fault him for wanting to heal the destruction he'd caused, when she was driven to lie and keep secrets and betray his trust for the very same reason?

_What happened in Manhattan was _not _my fault. _

She kept telling herself that. She even believed it. That still didn't erase the irrational but undeniable sense of guilt she felt over it. Or the need to make it right. In the end, she decided, it didn't matter if it was her fault. If she had a chance to do some good, and she ignored it, her guilt would become legitimate rather than imagined. So all she could do was stand on her balcony each morning, smiling half-heartedly and clutching the rune pendant around her neck while she watched Thor fly away over the horizon with his hammer in hand.

Despite her selfish desire to keep him to herself, the truth was that she was really very proud of him. News of his presence in London had spread, and when he wasn't helping with reconstruction, he was participating in other humanitarian projects, appearing at fundraisers, and raising awareness by championing worthy causes at the request of various charities and organizations. He was on the evening news a number of times, and was even interviewed by a talk show host once. Even in light the newfound gravity and thoughtfulness he had acquired over the past two years, it was still clear he was enjoying the attention, and it put some of that old swagger back in his step, though thankfully not enough to have him shattering mugs left and right. It made him seem younger somehow, more carefree, and it warmed Jane's heart to see him so effortlessly happy again. It eased her mind that her own restless anxiety and growing unease was not causing him any apparent pain or trouble.

.

* * *

_The king sat taller on his golden throne as the far doors swung inward to admit the Master of Masters. Lorens Amundson had been King Under the Mountain for just under a thousand years, and he had nearly always worn the title with an arrogance unbefitting. Now, somehow, it went far deeper than mere pretension. When he stopped before the dais, he neither bent his knee nor saluted his king, but inclined his head and shoulders in a gentle bow, as though he were truly one ruler addressing another, rather than a glorified librarian. _

"_You sent for me, Allfather?" Amundson inquired in a falsely obsequious tone that bordered on mocking. The king narrowed his eyes, but let it pass._

"_The astronomy guild has reported on the phenomenon blocking the Observatory. Their search was inconclusive. I would have you send a number of your best magic masters to investigate."_

_Amundson cocked his head to one side, studying the king with a bored expression that bordered on contempt. Then he bowed it once more._

"_It would be my pleasure, and theirs, to do your majesty's bidding," he assured the king, still flattering with a blade's edge of sarcasm, though now his tone had taken on an edge of irritation. The man really was beyond belief. "But one wonders, your majesty, why you chose to call me here all the way from the summit of the Nethermount, when a messenger would have sufficed to bring your just request to my ear."_

_The king beheld the scholar for a long moment, his face a mask of stone. When he spoke, his voice was hard with command._

"_I would hear your answer, Master Amundson: what do you know of the phenomenon?"_

_Amundson's left eyebrow twitched slightly, but a condescending smirk twisted his narrow face a moment later. _

"_How could I know a single thing, Majesty? I have never laid eyes upon it."_

_Amundson was devastatingly, almost frighteningly intelligent. He would not be an easy target. The king's eye narrowed._

_ "How indeed?"_

_ Amundson blinked at the frost in the king's voice, and when he smiled again, there was a great deal more warmth in it; a false summer of goodwill, hiding a cool repose of careful wariness. The king could do nothing unless Amundson betrayed himself. Which meant he was safe enough for now._

_ "If your Majesty has any further need of me, I shall be ever at your service within the halls of the Archive. Until we meet again."_

_ Without being dismissed, the Master of Masters bowed his slight bow once more, turned and strode purposefully out of the hall, letting the golden doors swing shut behind him with a resounding boom. The king sat silent for a time, piercing eye focused on the middle distance at the spot where Amundson had just stood. _

_ "No, I think not…" the king murmured at length, his eye focusing once more to stare at the door through which he had made his exit. "…I do not believe I will have need you for very much longer at all."_

_._

* * *

Erik had stayed on in Greenwich as well, gathering data and analyzing the aftereffects of the Convergence. He had offered to let her help him, and had been troubled when she declined.

"You can't be serious," he said, when she just shook her head, her fingers going unconsciously to the bulge in her pocket where the golden disc hid. "Jane, this data… the Foster Theory could… it could be the chance of a lifetime." He gave her a worried look. "I can't believe you'd want to wait even a minute to start dissecting it."

"I'm just… kind of overwhelmed right now," she told him, shaking her head as she moved around the kitchen island to press a warm mug of coffee into his hand.

In truth, Jane had been making plans to do just as Erik suggested. In New York. Before Loki's visit. But now… every time she thought of starting in on the data, it was like a sense of curiosity-killing futility welled up inside her. It gave her a headache, so she didn't like to look at it too closely, but what was the point of starting something new, when it would just have to be put on hold when Loki arrived and everything went to hell again.

_If he ever shows up… _It had been days and days… _what the hell is taking him so long?_

Besides, she had the Asgardian ointment to analyze… which was going nowhere until she could get out to Oxford and use Gary's electron microscope… but still… Her head was pounding, and her ears were ringing again. She squinted against the ache. She couldn't think about it anymore… she couldn't think…

Erik took the mug, and Jane looked up, jarred from her thoughts. The disappointed look he gave her as their eyes met made her feel as though she were about ten years old again. The uncertain girl inside her that need a father figure's approval squirmed with a kind of irrational panic whenever he gave her that look, scrambling for ways to appease him, and she hunched her shoulders, ashamed.

Then her brow furrowed and she glanced at the open window. Weird… for an instant she thought she'd detected the distinctive English scent of rain. But the sun was shining. She shook her head and refocused on her visitor and his displeasure.

"You can't run away from your problems Jane," Erik told her sternly. "The only way through them is forward."

"I know. You're right," she nodded, working her way around her knee-jerk need to be in his good graces. Erik was naturally critical of her, but she knew it came from a place of love. He saw it as his duty to guide her in place of her late father, though his guidance often consisted of maintaining high expectations, pointing out her weaknesses and only quietly approving of her successes, which was very much the opposite of her father's way. Even so, Jane had come to depend on him as a source of support; when he withdrew it, she always flailed around in a desperate bid to get it back.

_I wonder what he'd think of me working with Loki… _The thought made her insides freeze. _He can never know.._.

"I just… need some more time," she dithered. It sounded right, but she wasn't sure it was really the truth. "You know, to recover. Before I dive back in to everything. I want to go into it with a clear head."

He frowned at her, still troubled, but nodded, sipping at the hot drink. Jane could tell by his easy acceptance of her excuse that he believed she meant she needed to recover from the Aether. Erik, of all people, knew about the need for time to get one's head on straight after a close encounter with alien magic. If lying to Thor made her uneasy, lying to Erik made her want to crawl under a rock and die. Even moreso when he offered her one of those rare, warm smiles of understanding.

"That will take some time," he said. He looked away, his eyes softening with thought. "And it can be scary. Sometimes you don't know yourself, or where you are, or what's going on around you. Everything seems normal, until a moment of clarity hits you, and you realize that you aren't yourself, but you don't know what to do about it…" his eyes had grown distant and haunted. He wasn't talking about her anymore, he was venting his own pain and fear. After a moment's tense silence, he shook his head, banishing the disturbing reminiscence. But a specter of fear lingered in his eyes.

The teasing scent of rain evaporated abruptly as a ringing started high in her hearing range, pulsing to the beat of rising anger in her blood.

_Damn you, Loki… _She sucked in a deep breath, tying to think calming thoughts. Trying not to think of his words… _"… it was all for you… " _Trying not to add Erik's trauma to the list of things she shouldn't feel guilty for, but did. _How can I trust him._

"That's how it was for me, anyway," Erik said, trying to sound reassuring. He reached out and patted her hand. "But the Aether isn't the Tesseract. I'm sure it will be different for you. And whatever you're feeling, it will get better."

"I'm sure you're right," she said automatically, the words designed to play along with the lie of omission she had crafted… But her stomach tightened uncomfortably. Because the truth, if she were really honest, was that she _wasn't_ sure. At all. Erik's experience was… uncomfortable to think about. Because… it described something uncomfortably close to what she had begun to feel. And it wasn't getting better. It was getting a little harder to concentrate each day, and she found that her headaches, and the ringing in her ears was getting stronger and more frequent.

The truth was, it was getting worse.

"I hope you're right," she amended feebly. "I hope so…"

.

* * *

"Check it out, Jane! Classic Doctor Who marathon!" Darcy called, bounding up from where she was sprawled on her mother's sofa and wandering over to where Jane was working at the kitchen counter. "It's the Sixth Doctor, though."

"Hmmm," Jane replied absently, measuring equal portions of buffer solution into the test tubes in front of her. She couldn't complain about the noise. Darcy was understandably bored, since Jane had not seen fit to include her in the details of her current experiment.

"Don't get me wrong, Six is great, love the coat, but Four was _the _Doctor, you know? Jane, are you listening? This is _serious._"

"Yep," Jane agreed, reaching for a swab stick. "Fourth Doctor. Serious. Open your mouth a sec."

"Um… okay. Really though, I think they might actually deport you if you don't have a favorite Doc – aghck!" Darcy coughed, sputtered and jerked her head back as Jane jabbed the swab into Darcy's mouth, swirling it against the inside of her cheek. "Ugh! Ew! Why?"

"Tissue sample."

"_Tissue sample_?"

"Yep."

"Er… what for?

"Don't worry about it."

"Don't _worry _about it? Jane, you just stabbed me in the mouth with a q-tip."

Jane pursed her lips and didn't answer as she carefully lowered the wet tip of the swab into one of the test tubes, which gave off a vague odor of ammonia and apples; each one contained a carefully concocted solution made from the Asgardian ointment designed to measure a number of factors simultaneously. She held her breath as a shimmering green precipitate began to form against the glass. Then she let it out in a heavy sigh as the mixture flashed yellow and began to fizz, leaving a soupy blue sludge to collect at the bottom of the tube.

"What does _that_ mean?" Darcy demanded, her expression almost comically worried.

"It means that your cells are no more or less strange than anyone else's," Jane said sourly, carefully dumping the sticky mess into the hazardous waste bin. She should probably study the chemical precipitate; that's what any decent scientist would do. But frankly she didn't see the point.

Every single cell sample she'd tested had yielded a different result; not one had reacted the same way to the same solution. Her own tissue sample had sparked with the green precipitate and then overflowed its container in a deep crimson rush of what appeared under the microscope to be a substance shockingly similar to human blood. But every other tissue sample had yielded a different result, and none of them compatible with life as humans knew it. Some created a gooey slime or sludge precipitate of varying colors and consistencies, others foamed and belched fruity or rancid smelling fumes, yet others solidified into thick gels or even solids, and twice the entire sample had sublimated into a gas and she'd had to open all the windows in the flat and activated the emergency vents her mother had had installed in the ceiling, just to be sure she wasn't breathing in some unknown toxic substance. She had tested fourteen human tissue samples so far, and no detectable pattern had emerged to give her any indication of which direction to try next. It wasn't just a matter of variation. The results appeared utterly random.

"This is pointless," she muttered. Why was it so had figure this out? "I'm going about this all wrong."

"I could have told you that," Darcy told her airily. "You're an astrophysicist and you're looking for science in peoples' mouths. Even Intern could have told you that."

"Where is Ian, anyway?"

"Part time job. You know, since there's nothing for us to _do _right now except watch reruns of Doctor Who."

"Yeah, look, sorry," Jane said, grinding her teeth against a sudden spike in her headache. She took a deep breath to hold the frustration at her continued failure and humiliation that she was wasting Darcy's time while she had a front row seat to her incompetence. Her ears were ringing again, but it subsided, and she rubbed her nose as the thick, fragrant scent of rain invaded her nostrils. "Um, I think there are some data reports lying around in the back room that need to be filed. Could you get those in order?"

"Thrilling," Darcy deadpanned before she wandered off towards the background her mom used as a home office.

Jane sat there for a few long moments trying to gather her wits. She needed to figure out her next step, but sometimes it was just so hard to _think_. What was she supposed to do?

"Electron microscope… maybe…" she muttered to herself. She had old school friend, Gary, who worked in the biolab at Oxford... She scrunched up her face. The idea felt really familiar... She shook her head. Anyway it was a good idea, maybe she could study the chemical structure that way instead. But making the phone call right then seemed like a lot of work. And everything here was such a damn mess…

The test tube still had trail of blue sludge pooling at the bottom. Jane picked it up and upended it over the waste jar. The sludge shifted, but wouldn't budge. She flicked it a few times, her arm shaking. The smell of ammonia and apple blossoms had driven away the weird rain smell, and her ears were ringing again. Nothing was going right. Nothing was going the way she had planned. Nothing was going the way it _should. _She flicked the tube harder. Why the _hell _wouldn't it just cooperate? She flicked it harder. Harder.

"Damn it!"

Fury spiked and she flung the tube hard into the trashcan. The sound of it shattering against the side was only a slightly satisfying. Not nearly enough. She threaded her shaking fingers into her hair and pressed against the sides of her skull, fighting the pressure behind her eyes as the Doctor Who theme song throbbed in her ears from the sitting room.

.

* * *

_The king stood upon the brink of oblivion. He would not look down. Last time he had looked down into this abyss, he had fallen head first into a nightmare deeper and blacker than the iciest pits of Hel. Instead he cast his gaze outwards as the hoverboat in which he stood skimmed over the perimeter of the edge waters towards one of the sentinel stones. Out into the vast empty chasm of space. If only it were as empty as it seemed. _

_The king did not like to be so long away from his golden throne, or his distant vigil over his mortal goddess, but appearances must needs be satisfied and he could put this matter aside no longer. _

_He stepped from the craft as it came to rest, his retainer, Halvard, mounting the docking stone behind him. The sentinel tower rose from the craggy slope above, carved out of the living rock, but the king did not start up the stair that led to the fortress. Instead, he set off on the outer promenade towards the Observatory._

_The promenade ended in a wide courtyard tiled with white marble. The grooves between the marble bricks were set with polished opals, cut ever so slightly concave and enchanted in such a way as to conduct the light of celestial bodies and draw it in, to aid in the observation and study of the heavens. The near end of the courtyard stretched back into a deep, open hollow cut from the rock that housed all manner of astronomical tools and data gems for the collection, measurement, storage of new knowledge. The king knew that the floor of the cavern could be opened to raise a massive telescopic mechanism for exploration into deep space. It was not in use now, and that both annoyed him and gave him hope. The far end of the courtyard stretched many meters out in a natural stone balcony, magically reinforced, that extended out over the edge of the world as though straining to reach the distant stars which were studied there. It protruded farther into the darkness beyond the edge of the world than any other single point in the Realm Eternal, except perhaps a few shifting peninsulas out on the Fields of Eternity below the Nethermount, though no one was fool enough to go far enough to find out. Those plains held silent, certain death for any who walked them._

_Usually that area of the observatory was crowded with scholars wielding telescopes and scanners. That was currently impossible. _

_Now, a curtain of undulating light sparked and shimmered and writhed across the far reach of the platform, cutting it off from the rest of the courtyard. The king approached the curtain, Halvard in silent tow, gazing up at the curtain of magic. It was vibrant green, but through its shifting light, shades of blue were just visible on the other side, and where the two lights met, gold sparks showered from the energetic mass, shooting up high into the sky above until they spread beyond sight. _

_The king glared at it for a long moment before making himself move closer. Its appearance was alien. But he knew it on sight. Intimately. His face remained hard and expressionless, though his mind buzzed like a kicked pricklefly hive. He turned his face away from the shifting curtain, feeling like he was turning his back on an enemy with naked blades in both hands._

_Einherjar troops stood stationed along the perimeter of the curtain, and on along the perimeter of the observatory. More gold armored figures could be seen on the battlements of the tower above, as they could be seen at ever sentinel stone all along the perimeter of the realm. The king paid them no mind, though with the detonator weighing his cloak on one side, they were never far from his thoughts. _

_It was to a group of three Asgardians clad all in varying shades of green and gold that the king turned his attention. Magic masters. _

_One stood, eyes closed, palms up and tilted outwards, green magic hemorrhaging from his fingertips to flow into the curtain of light. The other two were deep in heated conversation, glancing uncertainly at the magic curtain as they talked. The woman, a tall, statuesque creature of perhaps 6000 years, the first streaks of gray just starting to show at her temples, was the first to spot the approaching monarch. She instantly turned and fisted her hand over her heart, bowing her head. The man beside her, a stout older man in his 9000's, quickly followed suit. The third, a new master fresh from the Archive, likely still in his first thousand years of his life, did nothing, his senses too absorbed in the task before him to be aware of the king's approach, or anything else._

"_Allfather," the older man said gravely. "You honor us with your coming."_

"_What have you discovered?" the king asked him._

_The magic master looked troubled._

"_There is little we _can _discover, my king. It is a strange combination of forces, some of which we have never encountered before..." When the king gave him nothing in response but a level, expectant stare, the magic master fidgeted and ploughed on. "We _have_ discovered that the phenomenon has began on the day of the Convergence."_

"_Is it a remnant of the Aether?" asked the king, his face betraying nothing._

"_That… seems likely, my king…"_

_The female magician cleared her throat, her jaw clenched tightly. The elder flicked a quelling look in her direction and shifted uncomfortably._

"_But…?" the king asked crisply, giving the senior master a hard look. Demanding honesty where he gave none, and feeling no compunction over the double standard. He needed to know what they knew._

"_But there is no evidence that this interstellar force is connected to the Aether, other than the time of its appearance," the female master spoke up._

"_It seems rather incredibly unlikely that it should be a coincidence," the elder man retorted brusquely. This was clearly a point of contention between the two. _

"_Unless it was an attack," the woman countered, her voice hard with obstinancy._

"_If there is no evidence that this magic is of the Aether, there is even less that it is dangerous or offensive."_

"_What else could it be?"_

"_A natural phenomenon of course." The old man scoffed. "You are young yet, Grete, you still think that Asgardians know everything, but there are yet some forces in this cosmos we do not command."_

"_Heinrich," the woman, Grete apparently, said warningly at his condescending tone. She shook her head. "It isn't arrogance, it is pragmatism. We believed that Prince Thor put an end to the rebellion, but there may yet have been a resistance cell in operation, waiting in reserve until the realms were in alignment to attack the…"_

"_The Aether's descent _was _an attack," the elder, Heinrich, said, shaking his head. "An attack on _every_ part of Yggdrasil at the same time! No corner of the the World Tree was spared. Any magical force in the Nine Realms that might have thought to take advantage of the Convergence to launch an assault would have been too busy battling back the Aether and save itself, to launch a strike at us."_

_ The two glared at each other like a pair of hungry dogs over a bone. The king watched them silently and said nothing, waiting for the battle of wits and wills to play out. At length Grete looked away, yielding grudgingly to her elder. The king then cleared his throat, watching both startle with a placid, patient eye, as though they had both forgotten they were in the presence of royalty._

"_Your pardon, majesty," Heinrich said hastily. "As you can see, we imagine much, but we _know _very little. What seems clear is that two opposing magical forces are at play." He waved a hand indicating the wavering wall of magic. "One originates from deep within the void. Its origin is undetectable to us. From what we have observed, it simply ends out there beyond the edge of the Observatory. The other…" _

_Here Heinrich cast a worried look at his colleague. Grete received it with a consternated glance of her own, and it seemed that whatever their differences, they had found something upon which they could agree._

"_The other originates here," Grete supplied carefully. "It appears to oppose the first force, and holds it at bay with an immovable might. The outer force breaks upon the inner like waves upon the rocks. But… though the inner magic arises from the very heart of our own realm… we cannot find its source either." She shook her head and lowered her eyes, as though expecting rebuke but continued speaking with a determined air. "What's more, its power is vast."_

"_To be clear," Heinrich said, "the only known magic wielder in this realm powerful enough to produce it would be your very self, Allfather, and yet, to generate and maintain such a shield for an extended period of time…" _

_Grete shivered as though the difficulty of such a feat chilled and daunted her. "…even one as strong as your majesty would no longer be able to stand under the strain," she finished._

_The king nodded slowly, processing all that they had told him. Looking for flaws or inconsistencies. Looking for deception. _

_Suddenly the young magic master gasped. The flow of green from his fingertips faltered and dissipated as he swayed and stumbled to one knee, head bowed before the curtain._

_Grete went to his side, whispering a quiet question to him. He glanced up at her, his face pale and wet with a sheen of sweat, and shook his head. He rose shakily to his feet with her help to stand beside his elders. He didn't seem capable of speaking just yet._

"_This remains the sum of your discovery?" _

_The three bowed their heads in confirmation. There was no deception from their mouths, their bodies or their eyes._

_They knew nothing. _

_Oh, Grete suspected something. But the elder master, Heinrich was in a determined sort of denial, and he would keep her in line. The danger was minimal… The king studied them for a moment. These were the three had come from the Archive, hand picked for this task by Master Amundson himself. It was hard not to wonder why. _

What is your game, Amundson…? _the king's mind wondered in a thoughtful whisper._

_They all bore watching. But there was another he was even more concerned with watching, and she could only be observed from his golden throne. He had been away too long. _

_The king signaled Halvard with a gesture. The retainer moved silently into the cavern to collect the data gems. The king turned to face the curtain of magical light. He stared at it hard for a long moment. At the silent war being fought before his very eyes. He wondered if this was what ants saw when they watched men locked in combat, all of it so massive and near that it was all but invisible. _

_He wondered, too, if this was what his mortal goddess saw, when she tried to understand the war being fought inside herself. Everything, and nothing._

_It was a sobering thought._

"_Continue your search," he commanded the trio, who fisted their hands over their hearts in acknowledgement. "Notify me the very instant you know more." _

_He cast his steely gaze out past the curtain, out into the distorted view of the stars, and into the dark places between them. Wondering. Then he turned and swept away back towards the docking stone. _

_He forced his eye pass without pause over the narrow fissure at the edge of the courtyard in which one of his explosive devices was secreted. Above, he once again caught the flash of golden armor as the warriors went faithfully about their duty. _

"_And remind the guard…" He said over his shoulder, pausing for one last look at the deceptively innocuous curtain of light. "…no one enters or leaves this realm without my word. On pain of death."_

_._

* * *

Days became weeks. And Jane tried act normally, continue her work, live her life, she really did… but her worries weighed on her, and as the headaches got worse, so did her concentration. And so did her temper.

"Mmm… mrg… damn… stupid… freaking… son of a… gah! Urgh… GRRRAAGH!"

With a shriek of pure fury, Jane brought the knife down on the cutting board with enough force to leave it standing on end, the sharp tip buried a good inch inside the scarred wood surface. She stood there, panting, tears of frustration stinging in her eyes, and glared murder at the innocent pile of carrots she'd been slicing for dinner.

Or trying to slice. But she couldn't get them to the right thickness, and it was such slow going because it was so hard to concentrate and they wouldn't cook right if they were too thick, and they _looked ugly _all different shapes and… and… and…

And she was about to blow her stack over a pile of carrots.

That fact was so jarring that it doused the flames of her irrational anger like a bucket of ice water; the ringing in her ears subsided and her bottom lip began to tremble. Hands shaking, Jane pulled off her apron, flung it down on the counter and stalked out of the kitchen.

"Why am I even surprised," she asked the empty apartment in a watery voice as she sank onto the couch and buried her face in her hands. "I suck at cooking."

That wasn't the point, and she knew it. She was _always _on edge these days. She couldn't seem to help it.

Loki was out there right now, doing who knows what, and she was stuck here, waiting, wondering, worrying, afraid all the time. He could appear at any moment… but it wasn't the idea of Loki appearing that kept her on edge. It was the uncertainty. The waiting. It was the fact that he _didn't _appear that was driving her slowly insane.

_Not insane… not yet… _

She hoped. But…

There were times she could swear she felt eyes on her, watching her every move. And it was making her crazy. It was worst when she was alone, and it was quiet. A ringing would start in her ears, and she could swear she heard whispers, as though a great crowd were talking in the next room, their voices coming as indistinct gibberish through the walls. There were days she spent hours looking skittishly over her shoulder and jumping at the slightest noise, a constant tension buzzing at the back of her mind, stretching her tight as a rubber band ready to snap. She hated it, and hated her own fear. In these moments, she barely recognized herself. She hadn't realized she was such a coward. Elevated anxiety on the edge of either anger or panic had begun to become Jane's new normal.

And still he remained silent.

_I can't keep this up…_

But the fact remained, it could be weeks before he made some kind of move. Months. Years. Loki had said that he was in favorable position. That he had no imminent desire to do anything but keep quiet. And he had never meant for her to know about his survival in the first place. There was no real reason to think he would contact her anytime soon.

_There is no real reason to believe he will contact me ever again…_

The thought had occurred to her once or twice. It should have been a comforting, even cheerful thought, even if she couldn't make herself believe it was true.

Instead, each time it rose in her mind, she found it left her feeling cold and hollow inside. Crestfallen and afraid. At the back of her mind, where she didn't have to look too closely at it, there was a tiny, unbalanced part of her that panged with disappointment as each day passed and he did not show himself.

Jane raised her face from her hands, scrubbing at her eyes with the backs of her fingers, and stared into the middle distance, forcing herself to face the feeling. She turned it over inside her head, examining it as objectively as she could. The feel of the air around her changed, cleared of the wet smell of rain that had been clogging her nostrils as her mind focused, and filled with the smell of fresh vegetables wafting to her from the kitchen.

The truth, she was forced to conclude after a long, uncomfortable moment, was that there was a little speck, down deep at the core of her, a mote of grey dust drifting between the dark and the light, that wanted Loki to be sincere.

It wanted him to _want _to fix the things he'd broken. She didn't want him to be the monster everyone else feared he was. He had promised her healing, and that promise had bred hopes and expectations. She found herself anxious to hold him to his word.

Nor could it bear the idea that maybe, just maybe, she'd been taken in by a lie. She already feared constantly that she was as heartless as everyone else thought Loki was. She didn't _want_ to be that gullible on top of it. And if she was that gullible, it pointed to a moral corruption inside her that she didn't know how to live with.

It wanted to give Thor his brother back. She didn't want to have to watch him open the scars on his heart again just to clean up a mess that, like it or not, she was a part of now. She was involved; she was responsible for preventing it.

And yes, damn it, it wanted to understand him. She_ wanted_ to understand him. The enigmatic puzzle of a man who had so easily seen through her, right down into the grinding cogs of curiosity and passion that moved her mind and heart, hinting with a few casual words that he understood her in a way no one else ever had. That he was like her. _She_, the scientist, the hunter, the seeker, wanted to know more.

God help her, she _must_ be losing her mind. She hated the thought that he wouldn't come back, because she _wanted_ to believe him. That aberrant little speck of gray at the core of her would not let her forget. Down deep in that tiny grey place inside her, she _wanted_ to trust Loki.

She _couldn't,_ and she knew it, but something in her wanted to.

"Damn it…" she muttered, frustrated and embarrassed by her own thoughts. _Idealistic idiot. _She was going to get herself in real trouble someday. If she hadn't already.

The smell of vegetable juice was becoming cloying. Her head was pounding, like the beat of a tympani drum behind her eyes. Muscle-freezing fear beat in time with it. Fear that her mind was no longer her own.

The mark was invisible; out of sight, out of mind. _I wish. _No matter how she tried to avoid thinking it, there was no way to avoid the correlation between the alien magic on her head and the pain inside it. Loki assured her it wouldn't influence her. But that didn't mean it wasn't _affecting _her. And there was no way to know how. Or what it really meant to choose between the two entities embodied by the symbol _uruz_.

_The beast. Or the rain. _

It had to be a metaphor, but as a metaphor it could mean just about anything. All she knew for certain was that she would choose the rain. It seemed like a foregone conclusion.

The beast represented rage and irrationality and base cravings and fear. It was the stuff of chaos and war and terror. That couldn't be the right answer.

Rain, on the other hand, was cooling and cleansing, purifying and renewing. When she thought of rain, she thought of the soothing patter on the window pane, and the heavy mineral smell of damp air and wet earth. Rain had to be the right choice.

If that was what he needed to make things right, she had decided long ago, she would do her best to give it to him. Now that she was this deep in the mix, her conscience wouldn't let her do anything else. When he was ready, she would banish the beast and accept the rain.

If only he would come.

"Why won't you just do something already…?"

Her ears were ringing. It was maddening. She punched the sofa cushions ineffectually and leapt to her feet, unable to sit still any longer. Thor would be home soon. She headed back towards the kitchen. She should at least attempt to have the food on the stove when he arrived.

As she pried the knife out of the cutting board, its bright edge glinted at her and she stopped, staring at it. The beginnings of a wonderful, awful idea began forming in her mind. The honed edge seemed to flash and wink conspiratorially in the weak late afternoon light, goading her…

She didn't remember leaving the kitchen, but she suddenly found herself in the bathroom, staring hard at her reflection in the large mirror over the sink. She squinted hard at the skin on her forehead. The spot where she knew the mark to be. It was there. She couldn't see it, but it was _right there_.

_Uruz._

It had made him appear once before.

"_If you can see me, it means someone is trying to unwork my magic…"_

Her heart racing, she looked down at the knife in her hands. It was wet with vegetable juice, little silvers of orange plant matter clinging to the blade. Snagging the hand towel on the rack, she carefully wiped it clean.

"_It will protect you…"_

She looked up at her reflection again. Her eyes were a little too wide, and her chest was rising and falling a little too rapidly. She looked afraid.

She didn't feel afraid. She didn't feel anything. The air was thick with the scent of rain.

_This can't continue. I have to do something._

She raised the blade, bringing it up in front of her face.

_Just a little. Just to get his attention._

She brought the tip of the blade to her forehead, where _uruz _hid behind Loki's magic.

_Just enough to make him come…_

Slowly, carefully, she began to press the edge against her skin…

There was a flash of green.

"Ah!"

Her forearm stung, not her forehead.

The knife clattered into the sink with an ear-ringing clang. She turned her arm over, searching for where she'd been bitten, cut, stung, or whatever it was that had caused that jab of pain… there was nothing there. _Strange… _She shook her head, blinking rapidly. Her head felt clearer…

"What…"

Her eyes moved past her extended forearm, to land on the knife where it lay glittering in the sink, and widened almost painfully as her breath caught in her throat.

"What was I…?

She pressed her hand to her mouth.

_What was I about to do…?_

Jane backed slowly out of the bathroom. She closed the door and leaned against it, as though the knife were a monster that she was trying to keep locked in the room behind her. Her hand slid down her throat to grasp the rune pendant laying against her chest. It always seemed to remain cool, no matter how long it lay against the warmth of her skin.

This wasn't the first time. It was just the worst. There had been moments over the past two weeks when she could feel herself spiraling in a kind of slow, downward unwinding. Moments of intense fury or numbness, followed by sudden clarity when she felt as though she were standing outside herself, staring at a stranger who was being slowly crushed under some intense, invisible weight.

_Insanity. _Her eyes swam with tears she refused to let fall.

At the same time, it was familiar. It was her. It was all her… _This is who I am…_

She knew something wasn't right. Like right now.

And those moments always passed. Like right now…

Jane squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, she couldn't quite remember what had had her so upset. All she knew was that she was _not _in the mood for carrots tonight. Breezing back into the kitchen, humming distractedly as she went, she swept the macerated vegetable mess into the garbage can and went to the phone to order takeout.

.

* * *

**TBC…**

**.**

* * *

**A/N: **Poor Jane, something's just _not_ right. I am honestly very nervous about this chapter, and the next two, as Jane tries to deal with these gradual, insidious, yet disturbing changes in her nature, without having any frame of reference for what is happening or why it's happening to her, or even, at first, the fact that she's changing at all. It presents quite a challenge… *author glares balefully at storyline and brandishes sledge hammer thoughtfully*…hopefully I met it adequately. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or critiques, so that I can continue to improve my writing and better create a great story for you!

As a reminder, the runes referenced in this story are based on real runic meanings, but some aspects may be embellished or uniquely interpreted for the purposes of this story.

Thanks so much for reading this far, and I hope you will stick with it, as I've still got a few tricks up my sleeve! More updates are forthcoming very soon!


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer**: The characters and original story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe do not belong to me; this story is not for sale or profit.

**A/N: **Hard work (and dangerously elevated level of caffeine) pays off in the end! And alas, I'm still posting this a day later than I planned! My muse is a twisted little slave driver, never ever satisfied, and I actually had to split this chapter in two _again. _As anyone who read my story "Creatures of Sensation" knows, I'm a notorious and shameless liar when it comes to the number of chapters I'll post. What can I say? I can't keep the drunken monkey off of the keyboard... Hopefully it paid off though. I'm still not satisfied, but if I waited to post until I was totally satisfied, we'd be here for decades. (Just ask anyone who's read my story "An Offer She Can't Refuse" – to my chagrin, it is not an exaggeration).

Thanks so much to everyone who reviewed, you have no idea what a help and a joy you are! I was pleased to see some really great predictions about what is coming (some were accurate, others less so – but all great ideas!) I was also please to see that Loki has earned a bit of some anger! *chafes hands together evilly and channels Emperor Palpatine* _Good, good, let the anger flow through you. Muwahahahaha!..._ ahem, down boy… what I meant to say was, I am so pleased you are still sticking with the story, even though Jane is so confused and Loki is being a jerk. The coming chapters should answer all! Well not all… there are still three more planned sequels after this story. You know what I mean. I am going to stop my long-winded, coffee-fueled rambling now and let you read. Please enjoy!

.

* * *

"_**Love's the devil counting teardrops in the rain  
To the sound of a chalkboard symphony played with nails.  
For what it's worth, I don't want to see you hurt,  
Any more than you have to…  
Once you lose yourself entombed,  
I promise you love the hardest way…**  
- H.I.M._

_._

* * *

_The king cast one last, longing look down to where his mortal goddess wandered, lost in her own darkness. She feared. And though he would not entertain it, he feared for her. But while she searched for the answer she didn't even know she was seeking, he had his own work to do._

"_Nothing is born without pain," he whispered to her from light years away, and then turned his eyes quickly away from her suffering and descended from his golden throne._

_The king hid his royal face and form, and in the guise of a traveler in a hooded cloak, walked from the gates of the golden palace. He traversed the ancient shining streets, hidden in plain sight amongst the people. He moved through them like a boat on the sea, gliding silently through their midst, immersed but apart. Sights and smells drew him in a hundred different directions, begged him tarry for just a moment, explore and remember, despite the danger of discovery… The traveler ignored their siren song, refusing some sudden descent into sentimentality simply because his heart had begun to awaken again. Duty called him on. He would not be distracted or turned aside._

_He made his way through the city and out through the inland gate, and traversed the inward road toward the Hinge. The journey was quiet. Uneventful. It made the traveler uneasy. Too much time to think with too little distraction. His eyes wandered out over the grain fields and meadows, the thickets and deeper woodland reaches that climbed to the border mounts in the distance, and beyond, to the veiled twinkling of starlight through the realm's thin atmosphere. There he found peace. Everything he saw reminded him of her._

_The gold of the stars was a fierce flash of warm brown eyes. The singing of the birds in the forest rang like her sweet laughter. The gleam of midday on the swaying grasses was the shine yellow sunlight on soft hair. Even the swells and dips in the landscape, in his imagination distracted with longing, became the soft curves of her body, which he dreamed fervently of one day learning and knowing as he had learned and knew these hills – an intimacy born from years of exploration. Even the distant bend in the Silver River brought to mind curve of a full, sweet mouth smiling at the secrets unfolding inside the dancing curiosity of a dexterous mind. A mind like his, but tempered with a goodness and integrity that could not fail, and veiled coyly behind a modesty born of innocence. _

_Temptation personified. A light in the darkness._

_The hours passed quickly in this sweet torture of fleeting memory and wild imagination, until at length his lonely hike up the inland road ended at a small, squat keep – the Hinge. It sat, dull and square-edged compared to the artistry of the Eternal City he had so recently left; deceptively simple and seemingly innocuous. Camouflage to hide the jewel at its center._

_He paused within sight of the wall, careful to hug the tree line, and observed the patrol. He saw only two guards moving along the battlements. With the main body of the Einherjar called to the perimeter, only a skeleton guard would remain here. And they were sure to be lax. No one had ever attacked the Hinge. It lay at the heart of Asgard, directly above the Core. Asgard had never been threatened by a force that could invade deep enough to reach it. _

_Until now. _

_The traveler tightened his fingers into tight fists with resolve. He intended to make sure it never came to that. It was why he was here. Well… some small part of why he was here. _She _was why he was here. And she was the best chance this realm had. He believed in that. Despite the detonator still concealed in his cloak._

_The traveler did not bother with the gate. There was an excellent chance he could talk his way past the guards without incident, but he might just as easily be detained. It was trouble he did not need. _

_A memory of his mortal with a knife in her hand flashed through his memory, and he closed his eyes against a surge of panic. He was eager to get back to the golden throne._

_So instead, he made his way carefully around the keep's outer wall, clinging to the shadows, until he came upon his goal; an old, slime encrusted drainage canal. Brackish water stood stagnating in the basin, concealing his goal: at the bottom, several feet under the murky water, the heavy iron grate had rusted through and been eaten away over the centuries, leaving just enough room for a lithe and flexible form to dive down and squeeze under. _

_The traveler pursed his lips, eyeing the greasy looking morass. It bubble slightly, though there was nothing alive in its befouled depths. _

"_You can't say I never did anything for you," he muttered with a long suffering sigh._

_Minutes later he was pulling himself out of the drainage ditch on the inside of the wall, moving quickly for cover behind one of the outbuildings, grimacing at the trail of filthy water he left dripping in his wake. A few quick incantations later saw him clean and dry, though he now had another reason to speed his return to the palace. He had not the least doubt that his spells had removed every trace of the muck, but as with each previous time he'd made this trip, he knew he would not feel quite clean until he'd bathed._

"…_not the same anymore."_

_The traveler stilled, then pressed himself tighter against the building, letting the shadows of the eaves conceal him as two Einherjar guards moved past on their patrol._

"_It cannot be helped," the second guard replied over the rhythmic, almost musical clang of Asgardian armor. "Queen Frigga is gone to Valhalla, and in the end, a king is but a man, even in mourning."_

"_It would be well if he took a new wife soon," the first rejoined thoughtfully. "A king needs a queen to soften his wisdom, and a man needs a woman to soften his wrath. Now that Prince Thor has relinquished his claim…"_

"_As he has done many times before," the second interjected pointedly._

"_Ah, not like this time," the first countered. "Edain was patrolling nearby when the prince spoke with the king, and heard him speak the words. Where before the prince spoke in petulance, now there was only wisdom and certainty."_

"_So you say he will not return this time?"_

"_I say it is so."_

"_Ten gold pieces on it then, for I say he will be back within the decade."_

"_On my honor, I will take that wager."_

"_Well, and done."_

"_But as I was saying, even if it be not permanent, the Allfather should take a new bride before…"_

_Their voices faded as they moved around the bend and out of range. The traveler emerged from the shadows, scowling disgustedly after the pair. He was tempted to follow and learn their faces. He would have dearly love to have them flogged for such a display of insolence. But their incompetence was so undeniably convenient, and he was on a mission. He smirked darkly as he moved out along the back stretch of the keep. It mattered little. This whole place had grown soft, rotting from the inside out with ease and complacency. All of the guards would soon feel his _unwedded wrath _in a brutal tightening of discipline - once he was finished exploiting its weaknesses, that is. _

_Leaving the guards to their own devices for the moment, he progressed quickly and quietly around the keep, and made his way to a narrow window with a loose latch, half hidden under the thick blanket of a climbing vine that had overrun the back walls. The window was set level with the ground and led down into a dusty old storage room that was stacked with rows of old wooden chairs under drapes, and let out into a dim, narrow servitor's passage. From there, it was a simple thing to slip through the back stairs and utility corridors, moving ever downward until he reached the bottom of the keep, ten levels below the ground. _

_He emerged from a service door into the Hinge Well, the ethereal glow of the Core lighting the shadows under his hood from beneath. With only a moment's hesitation, he descended into the Core of the world. Bare minutes later found him in the first cavernous vault at the heart of the Archive, ascending the Circle Stair. _

_There was no need to hide his presence here. Any he encountered would presume he had every right to be here. Even that pompous troll, Amundson, should he deign to descend from the Grand Terminal where he held his little shadow court, would give him no trouble. The Nethermount was completely secure, and therefore completely open to all Asgardians. _

_ He ascended through the ancient halls of stone and scrolls, moving indirectly, but riding the lift platforms whenever possible. He knew a path through the poorly-charted lower halls to the Academy levels above on foot, but it might take days to climb through the endless honeycomb labyrinth of caverns and tunnels to reach his goal. _

_In his youth he had haunted the halls of the Nethermount for days and weeks at a time, playing at having adventures and discovering strange relics and ancient tomes of lost knowledge. He'd adored the illicit mystery of it all, discovering buried and forgotten treasures that no one had seen in an age, ignoring Odin's stern warnings to stay away. In the past unwary scholars had lost themselves in the Archive, never to be seen again. It had never deterred him. As a young man he'd returned and spent several decades mapping the rooms and cataloging their contents as a kind of hobby, though he had not explored even a hundredth of the catacombs and chasms. He felt at home here._

_If he coveted a return to belonging in the uplands, here, amidst the dust and scrolls and remnants of the wise and glorious dead, he had never lost it. This was perhaps the only place he had ever felt he truly belonged. _

_Now, however, he had no time to explore or wander the ageless rooms of relics; better to risk an errant apprentice's officious questioning than to brook such a delay in reaching his destination. He intended to be back upon his golden throne before the sun set in the uplands. _

_ Even so, it was half an hour before he reached the White Stair. He climbed it without hesitation – perhaps even with a measure of anticipation – and emerged onto the gleaming summit of the Nethermount. _

_Into the striking beauty of the Garden of Idunn. _

_Granite flagstone paths and meandering little streams edged with thick, downy mosses wound between soaring crystalline spires, some tall as trees, some slender as a needle, others half as tall as the mountain itself, and half again as thick. Unlike in the uplands, there was no sphere of atmosphere here, only the narrow biosphere generated by the plantlife and maintained by the slight static charge of the crystals. The stars were always bright against the velvet sky overhead, day or night. Each spire collected the cosmic light and concentrated it, so that the garden gleamed bright as day with cold starlight in the eternal night of space. _

_From the peak, the cloudscape surrounding the Nethermount was visible, stretching away into oblivion on all sides in the distance below, a rolling plain of swirling mist that looked almost solid enough to walk upon – and was, up to a point, beyond which there was only emptiness under the mists; the only way to discover the location of the undulating edge was to step over it and vanish in an instant into the void. No one without a death wish dared test the limits of the Field of Eternity; those who did never lived long enough to tell its secrets._

_Amidst the crystal citadel grew and row after broken, crooked row of robust, dark-leaved trees, their heavy headed boughs hung thick with clusters of golden apples. The apples of Idunn. _

_The garden needed no tending; it was self-sufficient by design. The Gardener herself was long gone, her standing stone nestled firm and tall amongst the spires to guard her domain. Effective enough, in truth, for none ever came to this sacred ground if they could help it. _

_The place was neither locked nor forbidden. There was no danger, no trap, ward or pitfall to bar admittance. Any Asgardian was welcome here. _

_It was simply that few could bear the high, lonely weight of the ageless garden. It was a place of new beginnings, and a source of great and terrible loss. _

_But the king, the traveler, the one who stood here now, whoever he chose to be, knew no border or boundary – and he knew more than anyone about loss. His domain was wherever he chose to walk, and here, amongst the sweet scented swirling winds and starlit crystals, he walked unafraid and unburdened, because he was no Aesir to have lost what the apples took in exchange for their immortal gifts of strength and magic. With his bite, he had gained without losing, and he was content here, where even the fearless dared not set foot._

_He stepped further into the garden, lowering his hood. The face that he had worn when he donned the hood was not the face he wore now. Here he would wear no counterfeit face. He did not deign to acknowledge the fact that his accustomed face was also a counterfeit; his purpose was respite, not integrity. So the familiar lines of pale flesh, angular features and dark hair smoothed away all artifice, and the form he had known from birth lay over him like an old familiar coat that fit just right._

_More himself than he had been in a long while, he moved out amongst the trees, along familiar paths, letting his fingers trail distractedly along the glass-smooth gleaming crystal, over the rich, moss-soft earth and through the fragrant apple leaves. He allowed a calm to steal over him. _

_This was a lonely place. Hollow as any other. But it was safe. _

_Or safe as he was ever allowed._

_Deeper and deeper into the garden he roamed, losing sight of the White Stair and the standing stone, until at last he came to his destination. Here a wall of dusky rose quartz ringed a stand of trees on three sides, leaving the fourth quarter open for passage into the inner garden. The leaves of these trees were darker and hardier than the surrounding foliage. Most of them clung to the perimeter of the quartz boundary, close enough together to weave their branches together, mingling their fruiting fronds and crowning the circle in fragrant shadows. These he ignored, and approached the single tree growing at the center of the circle._

_The tree before him stood taller than the others, more robust, its branches more expansive. Its wood was thicker, and its roots broke the flagstone path that ran around it with new cracks and fissures. And its apples hung heavier and shone a darker gold than the fruit of the other trees. It was beautiful to behold, almost too vivid alive to be real._

_He laid his hand along its rough-edged, smooth-textured bark, his green eyes falling closed in concentration. Slow, sparkling tendrils of green light flowed down his arm, curling around his wrist and fingers before sliding into the grooves of the bark. The tree pulsed languidly, flowing golden sparks radiating from the points of contact to drift lazily on the soft breeze. _

_A deeper pulse rocked the garden, but its beat rose from within his mind, tilting the world alarmingly as it thrummed for release._

_Abruptly his eyes flew open, and for an instant, they flashed with a pale, icy blue fire. He snatched his hand away from the tree and recoiled, pressing a shaking fist to his chest as he battled back the blue flame. _

_The flame fought him, and the echoes of its influence swam under the surface of his mind with the familiar reminders._

You are chaos. You are fear. You are pain, destruction, misery. You are fire. You are ice. You are a monster.

This is who you are.

"_Yes…" he hissed. "I know. I don't _care_. I am a king. And I will… I will not allow…" _

_He clenched his teeth, corralled the boiling rage that rose with the whispers, conscious of the nearness of the tree. He could not allow it to be corrupted, not this, not again… He mastered himself, pushing the intrusion away, isolating it in the darkest, deepest, farthest corner of his mind. Controlling it. But unable to banish it completely. He was caught in a web, too tangled to escape. Even so he would not suffer himself to be prey._

_As it subsided, the he breathed deeply and refocused on the task at hand. The tree's magic flowed strong within the trunk, rushing through the branches to each pulsing fruit, but not as strongly as it should. It needed feeding._

_He reached into his cloak and withdrew a glass phial. The reason this journey was necessary. He had spent his youth and young adulthood exploring this mountain inside and out; he knew countless secret ways that connected the Archive with the Palace directly. But this sample was the last he would be able to collect, and he would not risk contaminating the contents of the phial with foreign magic. It was too precious. Too important. He pulled the stopper, and a metallic tang tainted the sweetness of the air. _

_Crouching beside the great tree, he tipped the phial carefully so that a single shining drop of ruby red blood welled on the lip and slid over. It splashed against the tree's exposed root, where it sizzled and ate into the flesh of the tree. He stoppered and stored the phial. There was no need to touch the tree again to feel it – the pulse of energy was palpable from where he stood, the apples fairly glowing with renewed vigor. _

"_How did it go again? That Midgardian myth…" he mused aloud. "Hmm… yes… "_Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die_". Humph."_

_He stepped back, examining the tree he'd fed on human blood from a sapling with a critical eye._

"_Fools. They make it sound like a bad thing," he murmured with a kind of thoughtful disdain. "We all must die eventually. How else can we be reborn?"_

_ Shaking his head at the folly of mortals, he turned, raising his hood once more, and left the apple tree to thrive. A long journey home lay ahead. _

_._

* * *

Jane sat alone in the quiet of her lab, trying to find a balance between the ringing in her ears and the sourceless scent of rain that kept wafting under her nose. She was afraid to look at the clock. She was afraid to know how long she'd just been sitting there, staring into space, while her emotions and her body swung between extremes. Trying to find her way out of the haze of confusion and fear.

Trying to figure out what the mark on her forehead was doing to her.

It was just as Erik had said, to her dismay and sometimes her despair. She didn't always understand that that something wasn't right. Sometimes… she forgot… But when she realized it was…

It was her. But wrong. Like she was a jigsaw puzzle, and all the pieces were still there, they were just put together wrong.

_This is who I am._

"But it' not… it's not…

"_It doesn't change you… it reveals you… it tears down every wall, every inhibition, every doubt, until the ugly, unbalanced core of you stands naked…"_

Tears started in her eyes.

"…_at the mercy of whoever has the knowledge to lay hands on it…"_

"You said you wouldn't control me…"

But he wasn't controlling her. There were times when it felt like _no one _was controlling her, least of all herself. She felt like she had one foot on either end of a seesaw… _no… a balance scale… _that was what she pictured when she felt it. She was swaying dangerously out of control on a balance scale, and each time she tried to right herself, she simply swung wildly in the opposite direction.

If she kept losing her balance…

_Eventually I'm going to fall…_

She reached for the golden disc in her pocket. Drawing it out, she ran a finger over the golden rune for the sun. Lately, each time she did it a warm little glow started up in her chest that felt dangerously like hope.

"_Loki's love is like a goldfly… you can catch it, but you can't keep it, because it dies after one night, and leaves only a bit of gold behind…"_

Jane was shivering. _Why?_

"Because he's an evil alien invader," she whispered spitefully to the quiet. "He's the bad guy that the heroes fought and beat. He's the man who leveled Manhattan. He's the monster everyone says he is…"

Her chest constricted painfully. The words didn't feel right in her mouth. They followed the trend, but ignored the outliers.

_I am a gullible fool._

_This is who I am._

"N-no…" Jane whispered, and the whisper retreated. "No, the data doesn't lie…"

In her mind, she saw the man she'd met on Asgard, the man who'd protected her on the Dark World, the man Thor had described, the man who had fascinated her, who had understood her, who had haunted her thoughts even when she thought he was dead.

Tears fell down her cheeks.

"Why did you…?"

She remembered Thor's words. "… _I don't know if he could have been saved…" _

Loki couldn't be trusted. Why was she trusting him? _I don't trust him. _But she was...

"_I would never hurt you…" _he'd said. As he held her airway closed… _"At least, not more than I have to."_

More tears rolled down her face she reached up to clutch the rune pendant around her neck like a talisman against a surge of fear.

_I have to tell Thor…_

The ringing in her ears spiked at that, before she breathed deeply a cool rush of rain-scent that chased the ringing back with a thought-killing calm.

Telling Thor meant hurting Thor. He was so happy and carefree right now… it was so good to see him cheerful and relaxed, not fearsome and forbidding and fighting for the fate of the world.

Thor's words echoed in her head again.

"_I don't know if he could have been saved… but I never would have stopped trying…"_

She couldn't bring herself to destroy that hope.

_Tell Erik…_

The thought of what Erik's face might look like if she explained everything to him made something inside her freeze with cold and go numb. She recoiled from the thought, welcoming the pressure that swelled behind her eyes as she rejected that idea. Erik would never forgive her for keeping Loki's secrets. She couldn't lose him...

_Tell mom…_

That thought stilled her. Her headache tried to surge higher, to drown out the idea in her head, but she ignored it.

_Mom's a doctor… a neurosurgeon even… and she's got no real stake in this. _

Jane didn't count the fact that she was her daughter as a 'stake', because she wasn't sure her mother would. The ringing in her ears spiked again and she shivered, remembering her mother's cold, disapproving look last time they'd spoken.

_I can't be such a coward. I am dating an Asgardian prince, they have a thing about courage… _Jane grimaced then, realizing she was basing this life altering decision on whether or not her boyfriend would approve. _Have I always been that weak willed…?_

_Weak-willed. Gullible. Frightened. A coward._

_This is who I am._

The thought was like a punch in the gut, resonating through her physically. She had snatched up her cell and was dialing the phone before she had a chance to think about it. It was only after she'd hit the green button that she realized what she'd done. She stared at the little vibrating phone symbol, hearing the faint buzz of it ringing. Swallowing hard, she pressed the phone to her ear.

_Go to voice mail, _she pleaded. _Go to voice mail. Go to voice mail. Go to…_

_Click._

"Nancy Foster," said a cool, clipped, professional voice from the other end of the line that made Jane's stomach drop. "Hello?"

Jane cleared her throat. "Yeah, um… hey, Mom. It's um… it's Jane."

"Hello, Janey," her mother said crisply. "How are you? I didn't recognize your number."

"Oh… um, yeah, I had to get a new phone a few months ago."

"A few months? How nice of you to call me before now to let me know I couldn't reach you at your old number. What if there had been an emergency?"

Jane closed her eyes at the critical tone, trying to remain calm, breathing deeply, trying to relax...

"And is it really necessary to say "um" in the middle of every sentence? You're a PhD, for goodness sake. I will never understand why you insist on speaking like a high school dropout."

Jane's eyes snapped open and she gritted her teeth, her brain buzzing with irritation and her gut twisting with anxiety that had no correlation to the ringing in her ears or the pain behind her eyes. It was just the effect her mother had on her.

"Mom, I really needed to talk to you about… something kind of important," she said, suddenly even more uncertain. How did she explain this? To her mother, Nancy Foster, superdoctor? _She'll think I'm crazy… I can't show her any evidence… she'll tell me to go to a psychologist… hell, she might even send people to… _Jane cleared her throat again. _Courage. _"Where do I start… well, the guy I'm seeing… he's… see, his brother… um…"

"You're seeing someone new?" her mother interrupted, a shade of real interest in her voice. "That's great, Janey. You know, I ran into Dr. Blake last week at a conference. I mentioned you to him, and he was very polite about it, but he didn't seem at all interested. So is it serious?"

"Um…yeah, I mean, I think so…" Her stomach tightened further at the mention of Don, her ex. _Why _did her mother always have to bring him up? The woman was an expert at casually rooting out every one of Jane's insecurities and poking them with a sharp stick.

"Oh dear… He's not some townie from that little backwater out in New Mexico is he? Jane, sweetheart, you can do better."

"No, Mom! I'm not even in New Mexico right now, I'm…"

"Well, where are you?"

"London! I was…"

"You're using my lab, aren't you?"

"…what?"

"Jane, I told you, I don't mind, but you need to _ask _first. Are you there studying that alien invasion?"

"Yes. Well, no, not exactly at the moment, because…"

"What? Why not? You've spent years going on and on about wormholes and all that nonsense. Now you've got some hard evidence to work with instead of just wild theories. You could really make a name for yourself with this. I bet Dr. Blake would sit up and take notice _then_."

"Mom!" Why had she thought this was a good idea? "Can I please just…"

"There's no need to take that tone with me, Jane. I am just trying to show some interest in your life. You never call, and when you do it's only ever because you need something. You really can be selfish. Maybe it's my fault you turned out that way, but I can tell you right now, no man will stand for it. If you're serious about this new man of yours, you need to remember to think of him first once in a while."

Jane felt herself wilting under the harsh light of her mother's criticism.

_I am selfish. Weak-willed. Cowardly._

_This is who I am._

Jane squeezed her eyes shut as the thoughts all but body slammed her. It hurt. Not just emotionally. Physically. Her head felt like it was about to burst, and she could barely hear her mother's chiding tones over the ringing in her ears. She sucked in a deep breath through her nose, relaxing her abdominal muscles, and let the smell of rain wash through her, taking the edge off of the pain.

"I'm sorry I bothered you, Mom. I… shouldn't have. I'll call you again later."

"Now, just a minute Janey." Her mother sounded exasperated now.

"Bye Mom. I… um… I love you."

"There's that 'um' again! Why can't you…"

Jane hung up the phone, her head spinning. Then she turned it off for good measure, wincing as she thought of the sheer volume of angry voicemails she was going to have to sort through when she turned it back on. People did not hang up on Dr. Nancy Foster and live to tell about it.

"Five minutes of my life I can never get back," she told the dead cell phone with a rueful sigh before she slid it back into the pocket of her jeans not containing the golden disc. It took a long, painful few moments to shove thoughts of her mom and her ex back into their boxes, and for some reason, the memory of her father's kind smile and the wise, knowing gleam in his eyes…

Her eyes stung and her nostrils tingled with a prick of tears. For an instant she smelled it again, that distinctive tinge of English rain, like an echo of a scent rather than a true smell.

_It means something… something important…_

The ringing in her head spiked again, then faded.

She frowned, blinking hard. Why _had _she called her mom again…?

"Stupid. That was stupid. Never ends well…"

.

* * *

_On the mortal's brow, the magic pulsed, boring deep into the fabric of the mind. So close. So close. _

_But the balance scale swung back. A pulse surged, whiting out the mortal's memory once more. The magic recoiled, pulling its tendrils back, clearing the mind it haunted. Careful. Careful._

_ The process was slow. The shape it wore was unwieldy. Unless it pushed harder than it should, the mortal would not fall. If it pushed too hard, she would break. The task was near impossible._

_ But with each push, it was learning. The whispers brought down the walls from the inside, gently singing them to ashes with poisonous truth: This is who you are. This is who you are. _

_More new strands of magic, delicate and incarcerating as spider's silk caught and bound with each passing day, carrying it closer to the vault of buried treasure hidden in the deepest recesses of her mind. Not long now. Not long now._

_ Gently it began again._

_ But the rebound from the magic's recoil traveled back along the strands of the spider's web woven so tightly around the mortal's mind. _

_They hummed back to their source, and beyond._

_._

* * *

_The traveler was nearing the palace gate, when a wave of pain and dizziness struck him full force. He swayed and staggered to one side, catching himself against one of the gatehouses._

"_Are you alright, friend?" a passing merchant called, moving closer. The traveler pulled his hood lower._

"_Too much mead!" he said in the cheeriest voice he could muster, taking care to slur his words slightly. The merchant gave a booming laugh at that and slapped the traveler on the shoulder. _

"_Best get home then, friend!" the merchant chuckled as he moved along. "No doubt the missus will be waiting to scold you!" _

_The traveler rested against the wall for a moment, dazed by the unexpected magical rebound. Usually the might of the golden throne protected him from the backlash… he hadn't realized it had grown so strong._

"_Waiting to scold me?" the traveler parroted, looking up at the palace where the golden throne and a view of his beloved awaited him. He slipped back into the concealment of the shadows. The droop of his hood concealed the wisp of a pained smirk. "Of that I have no doubt."_

_._

* * *

**TBC...  
**

**.**

* * *

**A/N: ** So the plot thickens a bit? Maybe? Hopefully this chapter didn't drag too much. As I re-read, Jane's mom almost seems like a caricature, but that conversation is actually based on one I overheard once between a mom an daughter, so believe it or not, she's legit. Anecdotally, after Loki's little mini-quest, I was tempted to write the bath scene, just so we could covertly watch Loki taking his clothes off, but I resisted - sorry.

I finished proofreading this at about 4 am (aka, my brain is falling asleep in a puddle of drool on my computer desk while the muse moves my fingers around the keyboard) so hopefully there aren't too many crazy errors, but if you spot any, let me know, since I just now, after like 15 years, discovered that its possible to fix and replace chapters on this site.

Lastly – I took a break from Within Temptation, so the song I listened during this chapter is _Love the Hardest Way _by HIM. Go listen to it, I love the imagery they use, and I think it nicely describes in metaphor Loki's way of overcomplicating his perceptions and machinations to some degree; in the end, he's making everything harder than it probably needs to be for both of them. But he'll just have to figure that out the hard way *chafes hands evilly some more*

Can't wait to hear from you! Please forgive the loopy rambling (I have seriously had too much coffee) and let me know what you think! More chapters are forthcoming very soon!


	5. Chapter 5

**Disclaimer**: The characters and original story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe do not belong to me; this story is not for sale or profit.

**A/N: **So, I figure, since this chapter is already proofread (as much as the last one was, with my sleep-deprived brain, so sorry if there are still any gross errors lurking in the mix), why should I make you wait for it? Its really just the other half of the last chapter. Have at it!

_**.**_

* * *

"_**I'm searching for answers not questioned before.  
The curse of awareness; there's no peace of mind.  
As your true colors show a dangerous sign…"**_

_-Within Temptation_

.

* * *

"Thanks, Gary, Thursday would be perfect. Great. Okay, see you then."

Jane hung up the phone, feeling strangely clean. That had been easy enough, and soon she would be able to observe the molecular structure of the Asgardian ointment visually. It was progress. Why had it taken her so long to make that call…?

She sighed looking around the lab. After that minor success, she felt restless. She needed to do something.

Impulsively, she opened up her laptop and entered a search for the Norse alphabet. Loki was silent, but the mark was still there. She couldn't _do _anything about it – every time she tried, her own mind got in her way. So she needed to _know _something about it. In the absence of any real way forward, studying the ancient language that was carved into her forehead seemed a far better alternative than doing nothing at all.

She clicked on the first page about Norse runes and began scrolling through the runes. She stopped when she found it.

_Uruz. _Jane stared at it, glowing black at her from the screen. In her mind it gleamed with a sheen of blue fire.

"'The aurochs'" she read. "Talk about vague," she muttered bitterly. Alexa had explained it to her, but without guidance from an expert, no one in the modern world would have any context for the rune's meaning. It annoyed her. The ringing started up again and she groaned. "Okay… learn something new."

She opened a second browser window and keyed "aurochs" into the search bar. Tension built behind her eyes, and the ringing ramped up in her ears as her gaze slid over the pixels, skimming the information.

_ … a__urochs__, the ancestor of domestic cattle, a type of __huge wild cattle __which inhabited Europe, Asia and North Africa, but is now extinct… _

…_in legend, it embodied the epitome of wildness and the danger that nature presents to mankind, despite all our efforts to tame it…_

…_far larger than most modern domestic cattle and had several features rarely seen in modern cattle, such as __lyre-shaped __horns __set at a forward angle and a pale stripe down its back…_

… _known to have extremely aggressive temperaments. Killing one was seen as a great act of courage in ancient cultures…_

Her eyes fell on a black and white ink rendering of an aurochs, its eyes rolling, its tongue lolling as it bellowed, massive, lyre-shaped horns lowered to charge a tiny, spear-wielding hunter. It was a highly stylized, old-fashioned image, yet something about it sent a spike of fear shooting straight through her, as though her hind brain recognized the representation of primal fear, even as her higher brain rationalized that it wasn't a very anatomically accurate image. Despite its bovine features, something about the drawing gave it an almost human face…

Jane closed the search, intensely uneasy. Why was she subjecting herself to this again…? She sighed, rubbing at her eyes, then put her head in her hands. It was getting harder and harder to concentrate. And harder and harder to avoid thinking about what that might mean. It was also getting harder and harder to keep her temper; the pain, the tension, the anxiety... that irritating, constant, ache… after hanging up on her mother, she'd been arguing with Erik, ignoring Darcy and she had even snapped at Thor the other day for no reason at all. She was annoyed all the time…

Her head cleared for an instant, and she stared down at her hands, biting her lip.

It hadn't been like this with the Aether. There had been no pain, only a burning rush in her blood, and with it, a lethargic peace, like a drug seeping insidiously through her veins, lulling her to sleep under a red and black blanket of darkness while it took over her senses. This was like being awake, but unable to think, her thoughts blocked at every turn by the ache and the anger, or the numbing calm of the rain-scent in her nose. But there was no blue haze over her senses.

_The Tesseract must be different from the Aether, _she thought despondently. _ It's going to destroy me in a completely different way._

A conflicting tide of panic and helpless despair tried to seize her at that thought. And anger, though that was always there these days. Always. The pointer on the screen shivered back and forth before Jane tightened the her grip on the mouse. She sat there, still as stone, for a long time.

_No, _she thought finally.

She looked up to see that her screensaver had popped on; it was that old fashioned one that simulated flying through space; as a kid she had been able to watch the screensaver for ages, letting her imagination carry her away; as it had on the plane from New York, gazing at the waves. Her imagination had always been enchanted by the stars.

Before her father died, her imagination had been the kind that could marvel at the thought of magic. Rather than dismiss it. Or fear it.

She let the simulated stars soothe her, as the sight of the stars always did.

_If Loki wanted to kill me, he would have done it in New York. This won't end me. I'm just tired and under a lot of stress and letting my fears run away with me. I'm not going to let this uncertainty get the best of me. I'm stronger than that, aren't I?_

The ringing in her ears sharpened to a high whine, and she winced as the pressure behind her eyes tightened.

_I'm frightened. And weak. How can I possibly face this, when I don't even know what it really is?_

_I should tell Thor, _she thought desperately once again, just as she had so many times in the past days, fighting to concentrate around the ache._ He could protect me… somehow…_

_Don't be pathetic_, she snarled at herself, the ringing so loud now that it made her vision swim. _I shouldn't be relying on anyone to protect me! If I'm going to hang around with Asgardians, I have to be able to take care of myself!_

On the heels of that thought necessarily followed the uncomfortable truth she was forced to admit: next to the Asgardians, she was little more than a feeble child in almost every sense, and compared to them, she _couldn't _take care of herself.

She clamped her eyes shut. She was weak, frightened, helpless…

_This is who I am..._

Her email dinged, loud enough in the quiet of the room to make her jump. Her eyes fluttered open. The ringing in her ears was gone, and with it the cloying wave of panic.

"What… was I…?" Her brow furrowed, but she'd completely lost her train of thought. All that was left was a linger sense of unease. _What…_

She shook her head, annoyed. It was impossible to concentrate… so much work just to _think_… She shrugged. If it was important she'd remember it eventually.

The email was some junk advertisement for porn. She rolled her eyes and deleted it, closing her email. The page of Norse runes was still open, though, so she scrolled down the page and began memorizing the shapes and their meanings.

A number of the runes she already knew. _Uruz, hagalaz, sowulo, naudiz, gebo, laguz… _She stopped scrolling.

_Laguz. _

Her lips parted in a quiet gasp as her fingers froze on the mouse. Something about that shape caused her heart to leap in her chest… excitement and something urgent, like panic, but less dark…

Now that she thought about it, that had been the rune Alexa Solberg had spoken when she touched the mirror, to let Jane see the rune on her forehead.

_Maybe I could…_

Her stomach sank at her own thoughts. She was no Asgardian; she could shout magic words at a mirror all day long and nothing would happen. It wasn't magic anyway, she reminded herself sullenly. It was a psychobiological alien ability.

Jane didn't believe in magic.

She clicked on the rune and read its descriptors anyway.

_**Laguz**__: Water; __**Meanings**__: emotions, fears, the subconscious mind, revelation of things hidden, intuition; __**Uses**__: enhancing psychic ability, confronting fears, stabilizing the mind and the emotions, uncovering hidden things._

_**Analysis: **__Water is often associated with pleasant emotions, love, compassion, peacefulness. However, to the ancient Norse, water almost always meant the sea, which can be turbulent, dark and dangerous, and filled with hidden depths that may contain many monsters. This rune, then, should be considered for both the light and dark aspects of water. It speaks to our primal fears of the dark, the cold, the unknown, and all the terrifying things that we hide away in our subconscious minds. However, where water may hide monsters in its dark depths, when it grows still and calm, it can become a mirror in which we are able to see ourselves. Thus, _laguz_ may hide our deepest selves, but it may also reveal what we have hidden from ourselves, force us to see what we have avoided looking at, lend perspective to self-knowledge and aid us in accepting it. _

_**Associated myths and deities: **__the Midgard Serpent; Njord, god of fertility and the wind._

Jane puzzled at the words for a long while, trying to work out why they bothered her so much. Why the rune bothered her so much… _Laguz _had shown her the mark on her forehead. But… that was physical, not psychological, as the meaning of the rune suggested. Wasn't it?

The siren song of _something_… something important… seemed to swell from the back of her mind, her curiosity calling to out to explore… wonder… imagination begging to be indulged...

But it seemed like such a long way off… and it was so hard to concentrate… _so _hard…

Jane suddenly realized her mouth was kind of dry. Uncomfortably so, actually. Maybe she should go make some tea. She was tired too. It was getting late in the afternoon, and her head hurt… Thor would be home soon… she should start thinking about making dinner…

Her curiosity slid away, and she let it.

.

* * *

_The king let his eyes slide away from his mortal as the grand doors opened, admitting a guard._

_ "Master Heinrich Bjordson, Master Grete Dahl, and Master Arild Olafson, of the Order of the Archive, apply for audience with you, Allfather."_

_ The king's eye narrowed. What could those three incompetents want now? The temptation to drop his guard and condescend to them was strong, but he resisted. While he had no doubt those three were Amundson's creatures, none of them seemed to quite know it. He was confident that there was no further discovery they could have made regarding the clashing wall of magic, and he doubted they would step above their station to address him of their own accord. This smacked of Amundson, not his dogs._

_ "Bid them enter."_

_ The guard saluted and withdrew. Moments later, the three magic masters he'd met upon the Observatory made their way through the grand doors and approached the throne. These dogs, at least, knew more of proper respect than the master that held their leash, all three going to one knee and fisting their hands over their hearts before the throne._

_ "Rise," the king said calmly, keeping the suspicion out of his tone, even when they glanced amongst each other worriedly as they reclaimed their feet. "What do the magic masters of the Archive require of their king?"_

_ The three magic masters glanced amongst each other once again, each looking equally reluctant to answer. At last, the youngest, Master Arild, stepped forward, tilting his chin up, pretending at an authority he clearly didn't truly feel._

_ "Allfather, we have come to request that you activate the King's Ward."_

_ The king stared at the young master in silence for a long moment, his face inert, a mask of stone, and enjoyed the way the boy's face broke out in sweat after only a few moments of his gaze. He knew the audacity of what he asked. It was tantamount to commanding his king._

_ "You must have a very good reason for this… request," he said at length, ignoring the way his heart began to race. _

_For all that he wore the king's form, carried the king's spear and sat upon the king's throne, this king could not activate the King's Ward. Not only had he never learned it… _

_It was already active._

_ "I… we…" Master Arild shook his head, gathering his courage. "We have come at the behest of the King Under the Mountain, Master of Masters Lorens Amundson," he said, as though that were a perfectly sound explanation, and sounding for all the worlds as though he were reading from a script. This one, at least, was truly indoctrinated to Amundson's little cult of sycophants. Else he would never have dared utter that first title before the _true _king's throne._

_ "What Master Arild means," Heinrich said, stepping forward with a far more diplomatic tone and shooting a worried look at the younger magic master, "is that, in his wisdom, Master of Masters Amundson thought it a prudent suggestion."_

_ The king noted with interest that the woman, Master Grete, said nothing. She kept her gaze trained on the floor at the foot of the throne. But her jaw was set and tight, and her eyes were uneasy. She was too intelligent by half. The king wondered how much longer her deference to Master Heinrich would hold out._

_ "The King's Ward," the king answered Heinrich, "has not been raised since the days of King Bor."_

_ "That is so, but…"_

_ "And one so learned as you, Master Heinrich, surely knows of the toll it exacts."_

_ The old master paled as he met the king's steely gaze. He may not know much of use, but that he knew._

_ "If… there were any other way to protect the realm… I'm certain the Master of Masters…"_

_ "Protect the realm?" the king asked, coloring his voice with confusion and contempt. "I was given to understand that there was no indication of an attack. You yourself said that the energy curtain was a natural phenomenon." He leaned forward slightly on the throne, tilting his spear so that the light shone off of it, cascading across the three magic masters. They flinched as it glinted at them. "Have you found evidence to the contrary since? Or was your original report… incomplete?"_

_ Master Heinrich paled further, and the other two joined him. A lie spoken to the king was treason. Heinrich had argued insistently that the phenomenon was no attack – likely at the behest, or at least in mimic, of Amundson. But now, if the king so chose, his words could be construed as an untruth if he went back on them at this juncture. The king very nearly smiled. Amundson's had schemed himself into a corner._

_ The king saw Master Grete narrow her eyes and risk a glance up at him. The wheels in her head were turning. The king wished he knew in which direction. She bore watching…_

_ "No, Allfather," Heinrich said gravely, backpedaling. "I… still believe this to be a natural occurrence. But there is a chance, however slim…"_

_ "I will not risk the King's Ward on a chance," the king spat gravely. "Despite what the Master of Masters may believe, this realm still needs its king."_

_ "Allfather!" Heinrich exclaimed, aghast, then fisted his hand over his heart. "No one would dare suggest…"_

_ "Good," the king said reasonably. One corner of his mouth turned up before he could help it. "If yourselves, or your Master of Masters, can produce doubtless proof that this is an attack against the Realm Eternal, and an attack sufficient to warrant the sacrifice of its king to turn it back, then your… suggestion… may have merit, and will be considered. Until then," he leaned further forward, meeting Master Arild's eyes in particular until the young man looked away, sweating profusely now. His voice was infused with iron, his tone low and calm – a threat like thunder in the distance, "you may inform your master that for the time being he will remain King _Under _the Mountain in name _only."

_Silence fell over the throne room as the three fisted their hands over their hearts at the king's command. He let them twist in the wind for a moment, then flicked his fingers, dismissing them. They bowed wordlessly and hurried from the audience chamber as though fleeing the shades of Hel. The king sat back on his throne with a bemused sigh._

_ There was only one game Amundson could be playing with this ploy. Because though no one living had ever seen the King's Ward, Amundson surely knew it when he saw it. Which meant that he knew, or at least suspected, a number of things he should not know. There was only one way he could know what he must know… And the fact that he had not brought them out in a bid for the throne yet meant he had a number of things to hide as well... and one in particular._

_The king's face darkened. _

_Then a wide, devious smile stretched across his ancient face. _

_ "Keep at it, Amundson," the king murmured, as he turned his gaze back down upon the blue speck moving around its yellow sun, and the beloved mortal goddess that waited there. "You're almost exactly where I want you."_

.

* * *

That night, Jane dreamed of being chased by a shadow with great, arcing lyre-shaped horns.

It pursued her down the endless length of a curving tunnel that twisted and turned, the walls grey, spongy, bulging in fleshy masses to block her view forward, and pulsing with a mesmerizing blue light. Each time she pushed a hanging mass aside, she felt tickling wisps against her skin, like she was running through spider webs, but when she scrabbled and scrubbed at her face, there was nothing there. Somewhere ahead of her, she could smell water, moist earth, wet wind, the smell of English rain in springtime. But she could not run towards it, she could only run away from the thing chasing her. Even though it took her in the same direction, it was not at all the same.

She could hear it behind her. The beast. Always just at her heels as she ran, the strike of its hooves crunching steadily as though it crushed bones into pebbles with every lope; the hot, snorting pant of its breath in her ears, leaving a sticky dew on the back of her neck; the prickling bite of its merciless rolling eyes, mad with animal rage, charging at her back as she ran with all the mindless desperation of mortal terror.

The tunnel ended abruptly. It opened onto an endless curve of pitted white rock face and fell away into a vast black bottomless pit. Beyond the pit, endless skies roiled with heavy gray storm clouds. Winds pummeled the cliff face, lightening screamed and thunder roared. And the rain pounded down out of the heavens, thick and stinging.

It was the same storm from that night in Manhattan. But this time there was no glass or concrete to keep her from it.

The beast was bearing down on her.

Fear clawed at her throat.

She didn't think. She jumped.

She didn't fall.

Instead, she tumbled sideways, rolling several feet out onto the curving white cliff-face, as though gravity worked differently out here. Now the tunnel became a deep hole winding into the ground upon which she cowered. She flinched back as a murderous bovine scream erupted from the tunnel in a fountain of steam and frothing saliva. Blue fire flickered from the depths of the tunnel, and she could just see the bucking, writhing shadow, the lyre-shaped horns flailing back and forth, questing feverishly for something to gore. She kept waiting for the monster to vault out of the pit and rip her apart. But each time it advanced so that the wicked horn tips protruded from the hole, the rain lashed at it, and it bellowed its frustration and pulled back.

She had reached the rain. Cleansing rain. Washing it all away. All the fear. All the anger. All the guilt, and confusion and sorrow.

All the relief, all the joy. All hopes. All thoughts…

Washing _everything _away.

A quiet began to spread through her. An anesthetic deadness.

She tried to climb to her feet, but the rain drops were clinging to her, linking together to form chains that hung and clung like dew on a spider's web, and each new drop that struck her was like a stone weighing her down with gentle, soothing calm.

Rest, it said. Let go. Forget. Stop thinking. Stop feeling. Stop being.

New horror filled her before the rain washed it away. She tried to be terrified, but the rain wouldn't let her. She began clawing her way back to the pit, her body heavy and torpid. It was like dragging dead meat. The chains made of rain rattled after her in long clattering, sticky trails. With each inch they stuck harder, became more inert, asked her sweetly to stop fighting. It was _so_ hard to remember why she had to.

But the worst the beast could do was kill her. This rain would unmake her.

As her fingers curled around the rim of the hole, which burned so hot that it seared her – the only feeling left in her flesh – she looked up into the sky.

The last sight her eyes saw, before they forgot how to see, was that the storm was not a storm.

Instead of heavy roiling clouds, the sky above her was creased with the fleshy swells and grooves of brain tissue, axons flashing with electrical shrieks, firing into dendrites with in thunderous roars of speeding energy. The rain stuck and flowed over her, not water, but cerebrospinal fluid, dissolving her being as she clung to the bore hole in the ground, which was no ground, but the porous curving plate of a skull.

With the last of her will, the last shred of her self, Jane pulled, dragging her chains of rain with her, and threw herself over the rim of the hole. Into the blue fire and the waiting jaws of the beast.

.

* * *

Jane woke in the dark, panting for air, fighting a scream. Her forehead burned like it was on fire. As she came back to herself, her limbs began to twitch, her fingers flexing and loosing again and again, every muscle in her body buzzing and vibrating and itching to do _something. _Her skin felt hot, tight, confining, as though it were suddenly too small to contain all her bones. She had an idea that she wanted to rip her way out of it and let everything inside of her stretch wide, kick, shriek, slash, _hurt. _What was this? What was it? What? What!

_Rage. _

That was the word that described this feeling. She didn't know what she was angry about. No, not true… she wasn't angry about _anything_… she was just _angry_.

No. No, not _just_ angry. It was more than a mere feeling; this was a reality, a state of being, a breathing entity of emotion living inside her, trying to push through her flesh…

She crawled carefully out of bed, her body trembling, and left Thor sleeping unaware as she ran into the bathroom and shut the door. She twisted the shower on and all but flung herself under the cool spray. It hit her face like a thousand needles of ice, forcing a shuddering breath from her lungs. She knelt, gasping, under the cleansing fall of water until her skin began to cool, and hot tears escaped to mingle with the cold water.

_A panic attack. It's a panic attack. From the dream. Just a bad dream. That's all. That's all…_

The water pelted down on the back of her neck and shaking shoulders as she bowed her suddenly heavy head.

_Like the rain… _the thought sent a tremor of terror through her. The memory of the chains pressing her into the plain of bone, killing all feeling with a touch, made her stomach twist hard enough to make her gag.

_Is that… is that really what it means to choose the rain? _

"That can't be what he wants…" Loki had claimed to love her. He couldn't mean for her to choose between these two extremes… Alexa had said that the rain cooled the fury of the beast. And yes, it washed away the rage.

But left nothing in its place. It negated the chaos. But with emptiness…

_ What if… _

What if those really were her choices? To be eaten alive by mindless rage, or surrender herself to that fog of nothing…

_"I would never hurt you… at least, not more than I have to…" _A terrible foreboding started deep in her gut. To choose the rain would mean losing all pain, all sorrow… at the cost of all pleasure or joy. But he wouldn't be hurting her.

_That can't be right… _That couldn't be what _uruz _was… She kept thinking it, denying it, but she couldn't quite make herself believe it. Would Loki sacrifice her if it meant healing? _Why shouldn't he?_ _Idiot. Why shouldn't he sacrifice me, if it meant getting what he wants?_

_I am a gullible, idealistic idiot._

_ This is who I am._

"Ah!" Jane winced, slapping her left hand down on her right forearm, which stung as though something had bit her.

Unbidden, a memory of something Alexa had told her echoed in her head, the memory loud and clear as if she were hearing it spoken in her ear.

_"When the Trickster is nearby, nothing can be quite what it seems."_

The fear in Alexa Solberg's eyes flashed through her mind.

_"He has marked you as uruz, Jane… You will be the rain that cools his fury. Or you will be the fire that inflames him to incinerate everything."_

Jane started to tremble.

Alexa's voice rang in her head once more.

_"There is more than one way up the mountain."_

Jane hissed at a stinging sensation on her arm intensified to a biting burn. She looked down, lifting her fingers. And stared, wide-eyed, at the glowing magic mark that had just appeared there.

It wasn't cut like the one on her forehead. It was more a burn, like the brand she'd feared _uruz _to be at first. But this one was green. And she recognized it.

It was Alexa's mark. _Laguz. _The deep waters that could hide monsters or become a mirror to reveal what was hidden.

It lay, Jane realized, like a sudden wind blowing back a curtain that had obscured her view, where Alexa had touched her before they parted outside her doorway in Manhattan. Her touch had felt… strange, hadn't it? She had forgotten about that. How had she forgotten…

Alexa had burned it into her… without telling her… against Loki's explicit warning…

"What… how… why…?"

Again Alexa's voice whispered through her mind, clear as an answer, though the words were not new, but came directly out of her memory.

_"All my intention was to give you this choice."_

"But… but… that's not… and this choice…" she replied. "… its' not a choice… I can't…"

Jane realized she was talking to her own memory, and clamped her lips shut. She wasn't crazy. Not yet.

_"You don't see it?" _the memory of Alexa answered anyway. _"How little we see ourselves… There is more than one way up the mountain… Choose."_

The stinging began to ease, and as Jane watched, the mark flickered and faded before her eyes. But like _uruz, _Jane had little doubt it was still there.

Jane closed her eyes against the thunderous ache. She felt like a pawn being moved around the board by giant hands of unseen players, helpless in her own destiny and about to be sacrificed for the sake of a more powerful piece at any moment.

Her forehead still felt like it was on fire. And the fire rose from the constant pounding behind her eyes, and the ever present ringing in her ears, and a shadow of that soothing, fragrant oblivion the rain offered hung around her like a fog, waiting to be summoned.

It was a long time before she found the strength to turn off the faucet and drag herself out of the bath. She pulled her soaked nightgown off, shivering, as she shut off the light. She stood in the shadows, wet and naked, and stared across the bedroom to where Thor lay still, sleeping through it all. The memory of the dream, of the dead, hollow nothingness welling inside her, sent a frisson of panic through her, and she was across the room before she knew it, climbing into the bed. She pressed herself against Thor's solid warmth, nuzzling his jaw, letting her lips and fingers travel the familiar lines of his neck and bare chest.

"Mmmm… Jane?" came Thor's voice, heavy with sleep. He sucked in a deep breath as she trailed her fingers along the chiseled swells and valleys of his abdomen, and his awareness of her sent a spike of sensation jolting along her every nerve. "What…? Jane… you are cold. What's the matter?"

"Make me feel," she panted against his skin, sliding her leg up over his as her hand moved lower. The echo of the emptiness still screamed inside her, and her fingers tightened on his skin, urgent. "_Please_."

With little more encouragement he obliged her enthusiastically, but he could hardly have matched her need. She clung to him as she cried out, and lost herself in the raw torrent of sensation.

She was supposed to choose the rain. Let it wash away the rage. Banish the beast. Bring healing and a new beginning.

That was supposed to be the answer to all of this.

But she never wanted to know that emptiness the rain had left inside her. Never again.

.

* * *

_The king stood alone atop the steps leading down into the weapons vault, peering with one grave eye into the pit of inky darkness. There had been light here once, gleaming from the gilt and steel of wondrous and horrific relics won in battle from the fellest of foes, illuminating the heroic conquests of the great warriors of old. Yet now, though the technicians and artisans all swore that the braziers and consoles were in perfect working order, no light penetrated the deepness of the weapons vault. _

_ Save one._

_ Unfazed and undaunted, the king descended, sinking into the unnatural sea of night that surrounded the burning blue island at its center. Despite its radiance, it cast no light beyond the small bubble of its own space, and sat glittering upon its stone pillar, mocking the darkness it had made with the glory if its inner light._

_The king stopped just outside the ring of blue light, arrayed in shadows, usurping them and wearing them like a mantle, proud and majestic before the enemy king. At length, he stepped forward into the light. _

_But the man that melted from the shadows was not the same man who had stepped into them above. His square, white-bearded face was now smooth and pale and angular. The broad bulk of a warrior's build had streamlined, lither, but no less powerful. Dark hair flowed where before snowy white braids had crowned his kingly head. And two eyes, like piercing emeralds, fastened unblinkingly on the deadly foe at hand._

_Slow steps brought the king ever deeper into the enemy's territory, gradually, for he dared not be direct. He moved in a spiral, circling the ancient monster before him and drawing ever nearer. To come too close too quickly was to risk its rebuke, and at this proximity, he was pragmatic enough to admit that he may not have the strength to stand against it. _

_It watched him come. It was not alive. Nor did it think in the way the living think. All the same, it possessed a hideous awareness that never slept, never stopped craving, never for an instant relented in its hunger to know, possess and consume._

_At length he stopped before the stone pillar. Still, it was a long time before he spoke. Weighing his words._

"_Your influence has yet to break my beloved," he said. It was the sight of her suffering that had driven him into the depths. His lips twisted with spite. "And your puppet's spell has yet to break through the King's Ward," he went on, quiet mocking making his tone dance. "You think you will have what you want if you can call your creature to you?" He leaned in. "You never will."_

_He stared boldly into the fathomless blue depths of the Tesseract. Into the soul of the storm. And for an instant, he felt it staring back. _

_His eyes flashed blue for a terrifying moment before he battled back the surging tide of fire and the formless whispers, pulling his control tight._

Chaos. Fire. Ice. Destruction. Fear.

This is who you are.

_A mote of blue flame burst through a chink in his mental armor, and in his mind he saw Jane, cowering on the floor of her shower, crying. It was a memory, several hours old. But it hurt no less now than when he'd sat upon his golden throne of supreme power and watched, completely helpless, as she suffered. _

_Suddenly furious, he lunged forward and dropped into a crouch beside the pillar, his eyes level with the cube, snarling wordlessly like a dog straining on a chain to tear the throat out of an intruder. It seemed to taunt him there, so unmoved, apathetically aware of him and unimpressed. Tension vibrated along his frame, as though he would like to attack the thing, stab or strike it, _hurt _it somehow. For all the ways it had hurt him. All the hurt it had driven him to cause. _

_For all the ways it now hurt _her. _ For all the ways it forced him to cause her pain. For that most of all._

_He resisted. There was no physical blow to deal this enemy. One may as well attempt to strike a star. _

"_You will not have her," he whispered, bringing his face as close as he dared to the bright edge, bathing his pale face in the blue fire, so that it shone the color of his true skin. "You marked her, but I chose the shape of that mark. I gave her a choice. And because she can choose it, she can control it." He grinned dangerously, baring his teeth in steely defiance. "You only want her because I want her. Because she is like me. But you could not hold me. And you won't have her. She draws ever nearer to the answer; she will _never_ allow it."_

_The Tesseract made no kind of reply. It sat, still and silent, an indolent blue spider perched in the center of its great web. _

_Covetous. Patient. Eyeless… but always watching. _

_The king shuddered inwardly, though he displayed no outward sign of weakness, his regal face smoothing and hardening into a mask of white marble stained blue in the flameless fire. There was nothing to be accomplished here but frustration. Letting the Tesseract bait him into this dialogue was beneath his dignity. There was nothing to do but wait. And have faith. _

_Still furious, but master of his fury once more, he rose, backing away and turned back towards the door, sinking back into the unnatural haze of shadow that the Tesseract had cloaked itself in, leaving it there to seethe in its own light and contemplate the darkness._

.

* * *

**TBC**

**.**

* * *

**A/N: **Hmm, so maybe Loki isn't _quite_ the dastardly evildoer he seems to be… here's hoping; but Loki said it himself: "What makes you think you can trust me?" Time will tell! As for Alexa Solberg, one can only guess what her stake in the game might be (feel free to do so in your review, I love hearing predictions if you've got them!) but she's defied the command of one of her gods to help Jane – not a small step for anybody. You know what they say, the greater the risk, the greater the reward.

A reminder: The runes referenced in this story are based on real runic meanings, but some aspects may be embellished or uniquely interpreted for the purposes of this story.

I feel like these past few chapters have been necessary, but not quite as action packed. We're building to a climax, but hopefully its not too slow going. I appreciate everyone who's stuck with the story so far! Comments and critiques are always welcome, you are helping me become a better writer! And the muse thanks you in advance for the motivation! No cattle prods today (though copious amounts of caffeine have been involved).

More to come soon!


	6. Chapter 6

**Disclaimer**: The characters and original story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe do not belong to me; this story is not for sale or profit.

**A/N: **So this is the last of those three (now four) chapters that were once all one long mega chapter. Can you believe this story was again supposed to be a oneshot (again)? The muse is out of control. Where's Darcy's taser when you need it?

Thank you to everyone who had reviewed, you are my sunshine! *bursts briefly into song*... ahem... and to everyone who has stuck with this story, despite all the twists and turns! I do worry sometimes that this is going to turn out like the ending of Tad Williams' "Otherland" series, but then I remember that I am audaciously comparing myself to Tad Williams, and I crawl back under my rock… I do have an outline, and an endgame! Promise! _Th__ough this be __madness__, yet there is a __method__ in't! _

Anyway, sorry, this turned into kind of a long chapter, but I refused to break it in half again. There comes a point at which you have to stand up to the bullies, even if those bullies are deviously adorable monkey muses with great ideas. So please enjoy!

.

* * *

"_**I see the truth that you've buried inside.  
It's in your eyes, what's on your mind.  
There is no mercy, just anger I find…"**_

_- Within Temptation_

_._

* * *

_In dreams, mortals sometimes wander beyond the bounds of imagination, and walk in the shadowlands where the line between thought and form may blur. There they give birth to wonders and horrors beyond scope of the reality, and it is safe, because they have no power to carry them back into the waking world._

_ But sometimes… sometimes, when they descend into that dreamscape, betwixt and between, it opens the way for something more to follow them down. And sometimes… sometimes the shadows from beyond the world find a way to follow them back._

_._

_._

* * *

_The mark pulsed on the mortal's brow, the blue fire seething and roiling with wonder and hunger. _

_Mired with the mortal in the dream of rain and rage, it had danced down the shaft it had opened in her mind, delving deeper than ever before. Always, the tunnel burrowed on, seeming never to end but this time... this time it found an end. The bottom of the well. And before being forced to recoil with her waking, it had at last brushed up against that jealously guarded vault that was secreted there. Cautious, timid as a new lover, giddy as a child with a shiny birthday gift, and reluctant as a scholar beginning the last chapter of an enthralling book, it peered demurely inside for a glimpse at what secrets it might harbor._

_There it discovered two things it did not expect._

_The first was a wall of water in which it saw its own reflection. A dangerous ward, for the magic itself was light and reflection, and the reflection of a reflection would turn the light back on itself and trap it in infinity. In times gone by, this mirror in the deep might have been the magic's ultimate undoing. But the magic had been reshaped by crafty hands, and it was more now; it had learned many new things. So now, when it reflected, it saw a spider creeping forward through shadows and fire, and the form gave it traction to free itself from the trap and look beyond to the second hidden treasure._

_ There, unreachable beyond the water mirror, a hidden strength slept, enshrined within a vast well where the shadows sheltered it, barred and bound by an ancient sorrow._

_The blue fire reached for the well beyond the waters, testing it with tentative touches, but as the mortal's mind pulsed with white and began to fight the dream, it had no choice but to surface, leaving the well unexplored. To do otherwise risked damage. Damage meant change. Intolerable.  
_

_No matter, though. Its questing touch had weakened the barriers, and they were weeping pure, pent up power. Power that the magic of the mark wove into a few trailing, silken strands of its blue fire. As it was pulled from the depths of the mortal's mind, it sprinkled that power over the shadow shapes of her dreamscape. _

_Giving form to thought. Reality to ideas. Life to nightmares._

_The wellspring was tapped, making way for dormant floods to pour from the skies. _

_The gates were open and the beast was awake in its lair._

_The mortal had no idea of the shadow she would soon cast. And the king on his golden throne, despite his arrogance, could do nothing to save her now._

_The web was pulling tight. Power was gathering. The scales were rocking on their fulcrum, ready to break._

_At the center of its web, the blue spider waited. Patience. Patience._

_It would not have to wait much longer._

_._

* * *

The nightmare had taken a toll on Jane, and the love-making after had worn her out even more, so it was nearly noon before she woke up. She shared a late breakfast with Thor, during which guilt at his curiosity and concern forced her to tell him innocuous little snatches of the dream that had unsettled her so badly, before claiming that she didn't remember anything more and changing the subject.

It was an outright lie. In a mind in which every clear thought had become a struggle, the dream stood out, vivid and undiminished as if it were happening before her waking eyes. The tunnel; the storm; the webs. The rage of the beast. The numbing rain. Far from forgetting, she couldn't banish it from her thoughts no matter how she tried.

The lying was wearing on her. She didn't know quite why she couldn't tell him the truth. It had started with a fear of what Loki might do if she did. It had been compounded by a few glimmers of hope that maybe some good could come of it. Now... there was more to it that she didn't quite grasp. But it had occurred to her last night, as she drifted off to sleep in his arms, that some part of it must be about trust. Not just that he couldn't trust her; she had spent so much time worrying about that, and about her own lies and betrayals, that it hadn't occurred to her to realize that she didn't _really_ trust him yet.

Even as they lay naked and entwined, the taste of him still on her lips, close as two people could be, some part of her had felt a cold certainty that she could not trust that the truth would not shatter what they had together. It seemed unbelievable that after everything they had been through, what they felt for each other should be so fragile.

Yet she had nestled closer as she drifted off to sleep, snaking her arm over him and holding him tight. And even as she did so, her sleep fogged mind had understood with a clarity denied her in full wakefulness, that some small part of why she was clinging to him was because some thing inside of her feared she would wake to find him gone. Just as he'd gone, leaving her alone for two years. Just as he'd returned to Earth last year, but rather than coming for her, had colluded with SHIELD to have her packed away. It was the same part of her that resented the rest of the world for needing him almost as much as she did, and resented him for flying away off the balcony each morning, seeming to give them almost as much as he gave her.

_I am heartless._

_This is who I am._

That had been her last bitter thought before falling asleep. And in the light of day, she still couldn't deny it.

Thor was quiet for a time after her sketchy description, uncharacteristically brooding. When Jane rose and carried their plates into the kitchen, instead of flying immediately off to spend the day helping others, he unexpectedly retreated into the bedroom and picked up the phone. That gave Jane pause, but his preoccupation suited her just fine. She pushed her disquieting thoughts aside, focusing on more practical matters. She had a phone call of her own to make.

Glancing over her shoulder to see Thor still murmuring into the land line through the cracked bedroom door, she quietly slipped out onto the balcony, pulling her cell from her pocket as she did so. She scrolled through the contact list until she found Alexa Solberg's number, and pressed the green button.

The phone rang twice before she heard a click. But instead of the practiced amicability of Alexa's accent, she heard a scrabbling, the sound of shrieks and giggles, some shushing, and then the high, sweet voice of a child came on the line.

"Hi!" the child chirped happily. Jane thought it was a girl, though she sounded young enough that she could be mistaken. "Who is this?"

"Uh, hi," Jane said, wrong-footed. "Um, my name is Jane. Is there someone named Alexa there?"

"I have an auntie named Alexa!" the child cried, delighted, as though she'd won a game. There was more high, childish laughter in the background. It sounded like someone had been feeding a kindergarten class sugar candy. "She came to my birthday party last time! My name is Kelda! I'm five now!"

"Oh, that's great," Jane said indulgently, the corners of her mouth turning up in spite of her confusion. "Is your Aunt Alexa there? Can I talk to her?"

"Auntie says the gods love you a lot," the child interrupted. "Are you really the star?"

Jane blinked. "Um… the what?"

"The star of Sun Mountain!"

The laughter in the background grew abruptly quiet, and in the sudden stillness Jane felt a thrill of goosebumps rush over her skin.

"Weeeell, not reeeeally," Kelda said in a sing-song. "But the _new _one."

"I… I don't…" She tried to answer, but she found she didn't know how.

There was a distant exclamation over the line, a scuffing noise, then Kelda made a petulant sound of protest.

"No, sissy! I'm talking now!"

Another voice came on the line as Kelda's high voice faded with disatnce.

"No, Kel! It's important! I told you not to… um… is this Jane Foster?"

This voice was older, but not by enough; a girl maybe in her mid teens. Jane noted that her tones carried the same hint of accent that Alexa had, but hers was lighter, as though she'd had more exposure to American English.

"Er… yeah," Jane replied, truly uneasy now. Alexa was the last person to know her full name without her having given it. She wondered if the girl had heard her name from her relative, or if she too had some kind of precognitive ability. "Is Alexa Solberg there?"

There was a short pause.

"No," the girl said. "Aunt Alexa… is not here."

"Do you know when she'll be back? I really need to talk to her."

"I…" the girl's voice faltered, sounding slightly choked, before she cleared her throat. It still sounded mildly tremulous as she went on. "No, ma'am," she said softly. "I don't know when she will be back. Not… not for a long time, I think…"

"Oh… well then can you have her call me when…"

"She can't call you," the girl interrupted, her tone ringing with resentment all of a sudden.

"What?" Jane's skin prickled. "Why not?"

"She gave me a message to tell you," the girl said, ignoring Jane's question. Jane heard her take a deep breath, as though gathering herself, remembering the exact words. "She said to say… 'When the King's Ward falls, you must not falter. You must stand strong and run for the edge of the world.' "

"Er…" Jane frowned. "What does that mean?"

"I don't know!" the girl snapped peevishly, suddenly sounding exactly like the bratty teenager she was, and Jane realized that, for all the nerves and emotion in her voice, the girl had seemed much more grown up a moment before. As though she were trying to shoulder a mantle of responsibility bigger than she should have to. Jane had an idea of how that felt; after her father had died, her mother had withdrawn in a lot of ways, and Jane had been left to basically raise herself.

"Hey…" she said, trying not to sound sympathetic; she didn't get the vibe that that would be appreciated, "what's your name?"

Another pause.

"Jana, ma'am," she said cautiously.

"That's a pretty name, Jana. Almost the same as mine."

More silence. Then, "Yeah, I guess..."

"Listen, Jana, I appreciate you giving me the message. Is there an adult there that I can talk to?"

"I'm the oldest," the girl said with a sigh, the resentment back in her voice. Then she paused, as though she had just remembered she was talking to a stranger. "I'm babysitting right now," she said in a cooler, more even tone. "The grown-ups are out now. We have your number, ma'am. I'll tell them to call you when they… when they get back."

"Hey, um… are you guys…"

A crash sounded in the background, followed by numerous high pitched shrieks and giggles.

"Put that… put that back Mag! No! Get down off of there, right now!"

There was a chorus of laughter and shouts in the background.

"Let me say hi!"

"Ask if she's really the star!"

"Kel got to talk on the phone! My turn!"

"I want to tell her about my birthday party!"

"Go sit down!" Jana shouted, then groaned long-sufferingly. "I have to hang up now," she said. She paused once more. "Um… good luck."

There was another crash in the background, some more annoyed shouting, and then the sounds of chaos ended with a click. Jane pulled the phone away from her ear and blinked at it for several seconds, more lost and confused now than when she'd dialed the number.

"I'm surrounded," she muttered dryly.

"You're off the phone?" Thor's voice came from behind her.

"Huh? Oh!" Jane spun around and hurriedly stuffed the phone in her pocket, as though she could retroactively hide the fact that she'd been calling anyone at all. Belatedly realizing how suspicious that looked, she cleared her throat and pulled it back out, holding it up and shrugging with a sheepish smile that she hoped covered the wince at her hopeless inability to lie.

Luckily, Thor was too preoccupied to notice.

"Good!" he boomed. "We're going out!"

Jane's eyebrows shot up and Thor's smile broadened in response. Not allowing her time to protest, he turned back into the flat, pulling her after him. Caught off guard by his sudden spontaneity, it didn't occur to her to realize until much later that she hadn't felt a single twinge of a headache while she'd been on the phone with the Solberg children, nor detected even a single note of ringing or any hint of rain in the air.

.

* * *

_The king narrowed his eyes as his mortal goddess deactivated her communication device. Extending his senses, he followed the voice from the other end. He flicked his eyes minutely to the left._

_There._

_His gaze found the familiar wreckage of Manhattan. He ignored the destruction with clinical detachment, focusing on the raucous laughter of children emanating the second level of a burned out shop that had been converted into a living space. _

_A dozen tiny mortals swarmed through a room filled with dilapidated, mismatched furniture, chasing and playing with complete abandon. Three more children, these only slightly older, tried to govern the younger ones into some semblance of order, with marginal success. Under the direction of the eldest, a girl of seventeen, they eventually corralled them into the middle of the room around a small television set, bribing them to be quiet with sweets. The king shook his head with a derisive smirk. He had little experience with children, and even less with mortal children, but he did not see that ending well._

_When the younglings were all sufficiently mesmerized by the moving images on the screen, the elder girl – Jana, she had named herself before – stared at the mass of children before her, then sighed heavily and moved to the back of the living space, carefully opening one of the doors there to peer longingly inside._

_The king's face darkened at what he saw in the dimness beyond._

_Within were seven full-grown mortals, the youngest perhaps nineteen years old, the eldest over one hundred. They lay on mattresses on the floor, their eyes closed, asleep. No… unconscious. Six had lengths of cloth bound around the wrist of one hand, and bound around the arm or leg of the seventh, a woman of middling years, so that their hands remained in contact with her skin, despite their unconscious state. _

_Every one of them was ringed in a halo of green magic. The six were pouring their magic into the seventh. The seventh channeled the magic into a spell so constant and draining that it incapacitated all of them. _

_The king could not trace the flow of power, it was so subtle and insubstantial. But it wasn't difficult to guess its destination. He had spied the magic mark on his beloved's arm the night before._

_He knew what the Midgardian witch was doing. He didn't know why. But the purpose of the magic was clear: she was trying to disrupt his design._

_Fury burned behind his eye and boiled through his blood. _

"_I warned you…"_

_He very nearly vaulted off of his golden throne, intent on racing to one of the secret paths to Midgard and ending the spell – preferably by ending the sorceress. But his eye chanced to glance up. Out into the void. He made himself remain still until the firestorm of outrage – and under that, terror – abated enough to admit rational thought._

_He could not leave the realm undefended. Not when his very presence here might truly be the only element that kept the wolves at bay. And with the King's Ward burning bright around the borders of the world, no magic cast from here would reach them. Nor could he send Einherjar. Amundson's dogs were likely watching for any sign of aberrant behavior. Not to mention, if Asgardian warriors executed a Midgardian family, it would raise difficulties with the mortals, which would like as not raise difficulties with Thor. It was trouble that could not be brooked at this juncture._

_He ground his teeth, incensed and feeling useless. There was nothing he could do._

_He shook his head. All would be well, he comforted himself. This Midgardian magic was weak, barely more than a whisper. His strength was not so inconsistent that this mortal magician could counter it. Not even with six more lending her their strength. Their spell would break against his like waves on the rocks._

_Even so…_

"_If you bring her to harm…" he hissed under his breath, wishing the woman could hear him. "…you will beg for death before the end."_

_The mortal girl was still standing in the doorway, watching her elders. Her eyes shone with tears for a moment before she blinked them back. She was afraid, but her back straightened _

"_I told her, Aunt Alexa," she said quietly, even though no one in the room could hear her. "So please… please come back."_

_._

_._

* * *

Jane reclined on the old patchwork blanket listening drowsily to Thor telling her the story of how he had once triumphed over the champion charioteer of Vanaheim in a chariot pulled by golden goats. Warm sunlight and a cool breeze mixed in a flawless balance on her skin and she smiled, laughing at his enthusiasm as he described how the Vanir's steeds had halted at the last moment, sending him flying head over heels to land with his stuck up nose in the dirt.

The impromptu picnic had been Thor's idea. It gave her pause when she took a moment to realize that, despite everything they'd been through, the closest they'd ever come to an actual date was that night on the roof of the old auto shop, staring up at the stars. Of course, Thor hadn't exactly called it a date. It would be more accurate to say he'd called it necessary, insisting that she was overtaxing herself, and that the day was going to be spent doing nothing at all.

"You've been so quiet lately," he'd told her, breaking her heart with the concern creasing his brow as they walked towards the park. "So tense and so unhappy." She'd looked away, embarrassed, but he'd caught her face with his huge hand and gently turned her back to face him. "Your work is important Jane, but you must not forget to relax and enjoy your life as well. A day out of doors will do you good."

Despite the uncharacteristic romance of the idea (which strongly suspected had originally been Erik's), she had been ambivalent at first, reluctant to let herself be distracted any more than she already was, worried that she wouldn't have her samples ready for her appointment to use the electron microscope at Oxford. Not to mention, she was certain that something as simple as spending a few hours eating sandwiches and potato chips in the park would have little to no effect on what ailed her, especially given the questions chasing themselves in circles through her mind.

Alexa needed to explain herself. Quickly. And while she was demanding answers from people who refused to supply them, Loki needed to explain himself as well. If her dream had been just a dream - the product of stress, fear and masochistic imagination - then she didn't need to worry - at least, not any more than she had before. But even if the worrying gaps in her memory had given her reason to doubt, the sensory hallucinations had grown too marked for her to miss the correlation. Deep down, she suspected the dream was much more than mere catharsis. It was a message about what was going on inside her head. Maybe even a warning.

Suffice it to say, the weight of her thoughts made her less than eager to spend even a few minutes without distraction for her mind, much less hours. A day in the park could not disentangle her from the web she'd caught herself in. It couldn't possibly do her any good.

Or so she had truly believed. But now that they were here, the fresh air, the sight and touch of green, growing things, and the warmth of the sun on her skin really had lifted her spirits. A band of tension she hadn't realized was drawing her tight had leached away, leaving her warm and relaxed and, for the first time in longer than she could recall, almost happy.

"The blackguard then confessed in shame that he had cut the legs off of my goats the night before, while everyone was inside the hall drinking and feasting!" Thor exclaimed, gesturing expansively, while Jane laughed at the expression of mock horror on his face. He was a wonderful storyteller. "As luck would have it, he vastly underestimated their regenerative capabilities. If he truly wanted to lame them, he should have stolen their bones…"

"Um… excuse me…"

They both turned to see a group of teens milling several feet away, staring at Thor with cautious optimism. The one that had spoken was pushed closer by his friends while they quietly urged him on.

"Yes?" Thor asked, warily but not unkindly.

"You're not… Thor, are you?"

A cautious half-smile lit Thor's face. "That is my name," he answered, only the slightest hint of smugness tainting the regal quality of his address. "But a man should not ask another's name before giving his own."

"Oh, right, sorry, I'm Todd. These are my mates. Um… could we have an autograph? And… maybe a picture?"

Thor grinned broadly for a moment, then checked himself and looked back at Jane.

"I am sorry, my young friend, but at present I am otherwise most pleasantly engaged. Another time."

"No, no," Jane said quickly, though she had to admit she was a bit annoyed…

"_Thor divides his affections."_

… but her annoyance wasn't anything like the ugly antagonism that had been simmering in her for the past couple weeks, and in its absence this little annoyance was almost comfortable contentment by comparison.

_He was a prince for over a thousand years. Now he's just a guy. I'm sure he misses the attention. No wonder he leaves each day to surround himself with a crowd of admirers. No wonder he can't sit still and be with only me…_

"Are you quite certain?" Thor asked, his tone saying what his words did not – something in him wanted to go spend a few minutes being admired - but he would forgo it if it bothered her.

_He's not perfect. But he's trying…_

"Don't worry about me. You can finish telling me about spontaneously regrowing goat legs later on."

Thor chuckled, sending her a warm look, before he levered himself up to tower over the boy and follow him over to the waiting gaggle of teens. Jane turned over onto her stomach on the blanket and propped her chin on her hands, watching him laugh and talk animatedly with the boys and bow to the girls, graciously kissing each of their hands with a gallantry that was going to ruin them on their peers.

_He's great with them. I bet he'd be great with little kids too. I wonder if he wants children… _Her eyes became lidded, her cheeks pink and her thoughts bittersweet as her gaze swept down to examine individual blades of grass peeking up around the edges of the blanket. _It could happen… the Solbergs are proof that Asgardians and humans can have children… And I'm not exactly getting any younger..._

The back of her neck prickled. So did her forehead. She blinked, frowning slightly, and looked back up at where Thor stood amongst the young people. Her eyes sharpened and narrowed. One of the girls was standing too close to him. She was probably about sixteen, no older than the rest, but she was curvier than the other girls, and it made her look older. She probably knew it. She was probably used to male attention, and to her attention in return being welcome. So she was all but plastered to Thor's side, running her hands over the rippling muscles of his arms under the snug-fitting tee-shirt he wore and looking up at him from under her lashes with an expression that was probably meant to be seductive; her youth and inexperience made her overcompensate though, so that the expression made her look obvious and somewhat cheap, Jane thought uncharitably.

Thor was roundly ignoring the girl as he laughed amicably at something one of the boys said. But he didn't shake her off either.

From out of nowhere, Jane felt a twist of jealousy stab through her middle.

_Don't be stupid, _she thought, scoffing at her own emotions. _She's a dumb kid with a crush._

But the blessed respite from the headache and anger had already evaporated. Her ears were ringing again.

_She's younger than me. She has longer to live. Longer to give Thor children. What will Thor do with me when I'm old? Will he stay with me when I'm sick, arthritic, decrepit and shriveled up? Will he move on to a younger woman, or just go back to Asgard and leave me alone to die? Or would he stay… would I want that? Would I want to look at him, young and strong and perfect, while I wither away and fade?_

Her eyes burned into the girl's back while doubt and jealously burned like acid in her blood.

The girl stiffened. She frowned and took her hand off of Thor's shoulder to rub her arms as though she were suddenly chilled. She looked around slowly, as though afraid of what she might see. A few moments search brought her around to where Jane lay. Their eyes met. Jane made no move, unable to bear the idea of making a fool of herself by showing jealousy over a teenager. She met the girl's eyes evenly, keeping her thoughts off of her face and out of her eyes.

It didn't matter. The troubled confusion on the girl's face fell away, leaving a blank, pale mask.

As Jane watched, a shadow fell over her, as though a cloud had passed over the sun – even though the sky seemed to be clear.

Gradually, the girl began to shake. She inched back, slowly moving away from Thor and moving to the back of the crowd, putting her friends between herself and the picnic blanket.

A chill raced up Jane's spine.

Even so, she rolled her eyes and looked away. _Definitely just a stupid kid; she can't even look me in the eye. _She felt stupid for entertaining anything like jealously. She refocused on Thor's gregarious interactions, trying to relax and let the tension leak back out of her.

But she could feel the girl watching her with a disproportionate level of discomfort. A shiver of real, visceral fear in her wide, innocent eyes. Jane wondered if she should feel more guilty than she did. The kid was really scared. But her ears were ringing and her headache was back, and all she felt was satisfied. And _that _made her feel guilty.

_I am a selfish, spiteful woman. I would see a child suffer just because I am jealous and afraid. I am heartless._

_This is who I am. _

Jane folded her arms and lowered her head to hide her face from the sun. But she could feel it on her back. It was warm, and forgiving. She soaked it in, and let herself forget. Forget who she was. Just for a while.

By the time Thor finally returned from his meet and greet, Jane had put the girl out of her mind, and had repaired her good mood enough to tease him playfully about being a celebrity. Thor laughed, shaking his head.

"Midgardians do me too much honor." He reached out and took her hand. "And you most of all. You all think me good, but I am only the better for having met you."

Jane blushed, looking down at the blanket, pleasure and shame mixing uncomfortably in the pit of her stomach.

"You give me way too much credit," she said quietly, a small, pained smile on her face. "You're the one who's too good to be true. I'm just trying to keep up…"

Thor cocked his head at her, then smiled his golden smile. "You're too honest, Jane."

Jane glanced up at him sharply.

"Wh…what do you mean?" He couldn't be more wrong. On top of being jealous, and selfish, she was a liar and betrayer.

_This is who I am._

Shaking his head again, Thor reached up to stroke a strand of hair from her face, then leaned back to prop himself on his elbows, and stared up at the sky. His eyes grew lidded and distant. The sun seemed to pour through his golden hair like liquid radiance, mesmerizing her. Everything about him shined.

"My mother used to tell me that when we are honest, we see only the worst in ourselves. And when we are lying, we see only the best."

He turned his striking blue gaze back on her, as though reflecting the whole vast, free arc of the sky straight into her eyes, and from there down into her soul, where it refracted with a glow like sunrise on the horizon. "The trick," he went on, "is to seek the best while remaining honest. That is when we know ourselves best."

He shrugged, giving her a lopsided smile, and the entrancing moment ended.

"Or so she said to me. Perhaps she was simply trying to knock me down a few pegs for my own good."

In spite of herself, and the curious weight those words left glowing in her chest, Jane snorted, then giggled as Thor broke into his own laughter, warmth flowing over her with the light of the sun. She clung to it, letting it drive back the chill inside for as long as she could, determined to brand the halcyon calm of the day into her memory.

But she could not help the icy little knot of foreboding lodged stubbornly beneath her breast bone, that there might not be many more like this left.

.

* * *

_The golden palace opened onto a small, idyllic courtyard, walled around by rich, dark greenery laced with small white flowers on trailing vines, like stars winking in the deep of night. At the center of the yard, a tall, regal standing stone of gleaming marble veined with onyx, cut from the living rock of the Nethermount, towered like a beacon. _

_Runes had been carved by a master stone cutter, to honor the passing of the fallen Queen of Asgard. Though her body had been committed to water, to fire and to the eternal night beyond the edge of the world, her memory stood with this stone, a pillar of strength for all who came to do it honor. _

_ Here stood the king, alone amidst the white flowers and dark leaves, still as a standing stone himself. _

_He had come here only once before, and he had been rather extremely distracted with an emergent situation at the time. He had not had the luxury to wallow in his grief. Not then. _

_Ever since, he had avoided this place and the truths he must face here for as long as he could. _

_Now, his heart heavy and his mind mired in fear and doubt, he found himself unable to resist its pull. He stood beneath the standing stone, unsure whether he sought absolution or condemnation. Utterly unsure which he could bear least._

_Time held no meaning when he stood here before the Queen's stone, letting the loss, still fresh and raw, wash over him. _

"You might want to take the stairs on your left."

_ Were those the words that had killed her? Would she live still, if they had never been spoken?_

_ A lesser king might have found it daunting to lay eyes upon the standing stone with such thoughts in his head. This king met the stone's gleaming surfaces unflinching, finding stillness in the center of its presence amidst the raging gales of hollowness and loss that whirled around it. The balance between calm and fury was a tenuous one, but he had learned to master it. To use it. It was a valuable skill. _

_ One his mortal goddess would have to learn. And soon._

_ He refocused on the stone. _

_ "You never knew you were blessing two sons with your sacrifice," the king told the stone quietly. "Unbelievable as it seems, I think you loved them both still, in the end." His throat tried to close on the words, but he forced them out anyway. Daring her to hate and revile him from out of the halls of the dead. "Would you finally learn to despise me, if I said that I was grateful that it was you, and not her?"_

_The wind was in the white flowers, and when it whispered to him, it sounded like her voice, a comforting lie in the sunshine. He stood and listened to it for a long time._

_The fallen queen had been his sun at noonday, when no shadows had clouded his eyes or concealed the pitfalls of the world. What he wouldn't give for her warmth and wisdom now… _

_Anything. Except one thing._

_His beloved mortal had been his beacon in the gloom of night, when all other lights, even the brightest, had succumbed to the encroaching darkness. If one of them had to die that day… if only one could be saved… if he could choose… the choice was sickeningly simple in the end._

"_I am… so sorry," the king breathed into the breeze. Hating himself as she never had. "I…" His throat tried to close again, but the gleam of the stone and the sweet whisper of the wind in the flowers, gently ripped the promise from his lips. One he didn't fully understand. One he wasn't sure he could keep. "I will defend what you gave your life to protect."_

_The stone made no reply. Only the faintly gleaming stars, pale but still visible, even at midday, bore witness to his oath. Expecting much. He felt the weight of the detonator in the folds of his cloak. Maybe too much._

_ At length he turned away, his spear flashing in the sunlight, and strode back towards his seat of power, the red of his kingly cape flowing like a river of crimson heartblood in his wake. He did not allow himself to dwell further on the queen named upon the standing stone. Nor the occupant of the crypt beneath it._

_ For the tomb there was not empty. _

_The queen was gone, her body and spirit dismantled and returned to the fabric of the universe, her soul sent with all ceremony to the halls of Valhalla. Yet even so, beneath the standing stone, in the shadows of the ceremonial catacombs, a regal figure lay in repose, entombed unknown in the quiet. Sheltered, secreted, hidden. Lit with the glimmering golden shimmer of a soul forge. _

_._

* * *

It wasn't possible.

Jane sat at her lab bench, the disc of Asgardian ointment beside her, and glared through the microscope's lens with the intensity of a laser, willing the sample she was watching to obey the laws of physics and start behaving like normal baryonic matter.

Gary had met her this morning at the door to the Oxford biolab, and after some small talk and several diplomatic but pointed assurances that she was not interested in having dinner with him, she had gained access to the electron microscope.

The results of the tests had been striking and immediate. And impossible. She'd run sample after sample through the machine, certain it had to be wrong, until Gary finally had to kick her out of the lab to lock up for the day.

But impossible or not, for once, all the tests had come together in agreement, and the results had her reeling with disbelief.

The Asgardian ointment had a chemical structure unlike any she'd ever encountered before. That was hardly surprising. What left her jaw hanging open again and again was the fact that the ointment despite its stable state, was _changing_ before her eyes.

The atomic structure itself seemed to be in a state of active quantum flux. Not just an atom or two here and there. The chemical compounds were continually shifting forms and state, _en masse,_ atoms and elements rearranging seemingly at random to form new patterns of matter and energy, in ways that nature as she understood it could not account for. Lacking an electron microscope of her own, she was now holed up in her lab, simply watching a dye-enhanced sample of the compound through the highest setting on her light microscope. The substance seemed to writhe and flow through itself restlessly. It almost seemed alive.

It was amongst the most amazing things she'd ever witnessed, and that was really saying something. The thrill of this unknown should have left her buzzing with excitement, overjoyed at a new frontier to venture into, racing through the possible implications these new interactions between matter and energy might pose for science in general, and for her own astrophysics research in particular.

Instead, she felt only a growing weight in the pit of her gut.

"Hey, Jane," Darcy said from somewhere behind her, sounding almost obnoxiously bored. "I finished running those scanner readings through the data analysis program."

Jane ignored her. A pain, like she was banging her head against a wall, threatened to split her skull. It was a wall she couldn't climb, circumvent or plow through. She was stuck railing against it like a wave crashing against a cliff. A hamster, running on some insipid metal wheel and going nowhere.

"Did you want me to file these readouts? Or did you want to look at them first? I don't think they're any different from the last set, but you're mega scientist."

There were chemical reactions and energy exchanges at play here that she had no way of measuring. Microscopes were useless beyond this point except as a sideshow, and none of her chemical or thermal tests yielded anything but random gibberish. How was she supposed to analyze this data when she couldn't even collect and measure it?

"Earth to Jane? You in there?"

She could see a fascinating new microscopic world before her. But her ability, her technology, her very _senses _were too limited to understand it.

"Jaaaaane. Janejanejane! Seriously dude, where do you want these papers?"

Her ears were ringing with the headache building higher and higher behind her eyes, fed on the agitated helplessness of her limitations. All of her limitations. Everything felt like it was falling in on her, crumbling faster than she could shore it up, a pointless struggle against inevitable failure.

And Darcy just would. Not. Stop. Talking.

"If you keep ignoring me and I'm going to start playing with the buttons on the gravemetric resequencer…"

"Shut up, Darcy!" Jane snarled, whirling around to glare her impotent rage at the chattering intern. The ringing in her ears increased. "Just SHUT UP!"

Darcy startled physically, backing several steps away until her hip struck the far lab bench, and the stack of readouts fell from her trembling hands to scatter across the floor in a flapping flurry of data. The shadows in the dimmed laboratory seemed to lengthen and deepen ominously. Darcy recoiled further from Jane, paling, her bottom lip trembling slightly before she caught it between her teeth. There was a spark of real fear in her eyes. And for an instant something inside Jane, something ugly, liked it.

_This is who I am._

"Wh… What the hell!" Darcy shouted. It should have been an angry, defiant tone. That was Darcy. That was how she handled conflict. With anger or sarcasm. But her voice was high, quiet and filled with a kind of shocked horror as she stared unblinkingly at her employer.

She wasn't angry. She was frightened. Really frightened.

The realization disrupted the fury building behind Jane's eyes.

Darcy was her friend. It wasn't her fault. She didn't want Darcy to be afraid of her.

_I don't want to hurt her…_

She hardly knew what she meant by the thought. Of course she didn't want to hurt Darcy… But she could feel the anger clawing its way up her throat, like the beast burrowing up out of the flickering pit of blue fire in her dream… The shadows seemed to lengthen, and Darcy seemed to shrink as the world distorted around her…

_I don't want to hurt her!_

Her breath catching in her lungs, panic closing her throat against the rage, Jane, desperate, summoned up a mental image of rain. She pictured it inside, washing her clean of anger, running rivulets stripping away the grime over her rage and hissing on the hot coals of fury smoldering in the pit of her gut.

As though on command, a cooling rush swept through her almost instantly, the scent of rain welling over her, washing away the fear and the fury… her face slackened, her eyelids drooping and her body as her muscles relaxed. Darcy blinked, several times, cautiously cocking her head at her, the mask of fear on her face melting with a hint of concern…

"Jane?"

_I can control it… _she thought. _I don't have to worry… I can… _

…then came the first hint of the dead emptiness, the rain like lidocaine, deadening all feeling, scouring away good and bad alike, and Jane, feeling like an utter coward, but just grateful to be able to _feel _at all, lost her resolve. She shoved the image of the rain away, pushing a hard breath out through her nose to banish the smell, rejecting it almost instinctively, and with the full force of her being.

She couldn't, she just _couldn't…_

Rage poured back in like molten lead searing her veins. Overwhelmed by the sheer force of the onslaught, she slammed her fist down on the work table, breathing hard. Darcy jumped at the sound.

"What is your _deal_?" Darcy shook her head almost frantically, pinning Jane with a deeply worried look, dead serious for once. "I don't know what's up with you lately, Jane, but this _isn't_ you. Just… just… call me when you snap out of it!"

She didn't wait for a reply. She dashed for the door with the air of someone operating on a sense of self preservation, grabbing her jacket from the peg on the way out, and slamming the door behind her.

Jane swallowed hard, and hid her face in her hands, her mind on fire, willing the ringing in her ears to subside without destroying her ability to feel.

"This isn't me," she parroted, her voice small and unsure.

_Yes, it is, _her mind whispered back. _A selfish, cowardly liar with a short, ugly temper. Someone who would trade the welfare of others for knowledge. Just like I tried to do to Thor in the desert. If Erik and Darcy hadn't been there, would I have taken Thor to the hospital, or let him wander off into the dark with a possible head injury while I studied the Bifrost site? _

_Haven't I answered that now, though? I kept Loki's secret. I chose my curiosity and my fear over doing what was right. I chose to protect a murderer. I'm a liar. A betrayer. A monster._

_A beast._

_ This is who I am._

"No."

The word rang in the silence of the lab. And rang in the sudden silence inside her head, as the whispers seemed to hold their breath.

"No," she said more softly, lifting her face.

A poster of the Milky Way Galaxy on the far wall crossed her line of sight, and she felt that old familiar peace that the sight of stars always brought well up over the raw ragged edges of her self loathing and the soul deep pain of her inadequacies. "No, I don't _want _that to be me."

If her choice was between becoming some kind of rage monster, or an unfeeling shell of herself…

_ Maybe… I can control it…_

Trembling, she called on the memory of rain from her dream.

_Smell is the sense strongest associated with memory, _her mind supplied distantly, and she recalled the heavy, pungent smell of it, along with the tang of ozone, the wildness of raking winds and the richness of wet earth, all the scents of the storm. Her forehead tingled as she pictured the rain falling over her, washing away the headache and the ringing and the fear and the fury.

_Slowly. _

The ringing died away.

_Just a little. _

The ache subsided.

_Just enough to…_

The smell of rain rose over her. The cold invaded her bones like she'd fallen through the ice into freezing waters. Her skin stung with a hundred scouring needles.

She couldn't control it.

For an instant there was a kind of blissful relief, a rebound euphoria so potent that she nearly moaned out loud. Tears sprang to her eyes, and for a few seconds she thought, through the invisible storm in her senses, that she heard her self laugh for joy.

Then her muscles slackened and went limp. Her eyes drooped and her mouth fell open mid-laugh. She arched once, a little whimper escaping between her lips as she slid down to slump bonelessly over the work bench, her face landing hard against the cold plastic as her skin went numb under the onslaught of the phantom rain. A deadened calm poured over her, like the waters of the Lethe, and slowly her boneless limbs drooped, heavy as stones. She felt herself sliding sideways.

And she didn't care.

The work stool tilted under her, and scraped at the floor as though scrabbling in a panic to find something to grasp on to, struggling to hold her up. It failed, and clattered onto its side, spilling her listless body against the tile with a thump like a sack of wet flour hitting pavement.

She was in pain. Her head swam. She was lying on her arm.

It didn't matter.

Nothing mattered.

There was no relief or bliss now. There was only a cold, bloodless emptiness. Just like the dream, the chains of raindrops sluicing over her skin, cleansing her of all feeling. Except she lost none of her consciousness, none of her senses; she simply ceased to care about them.

Nothing meant anything.

Time passed, minutes, years, hours, seconds, a relative eternity that passed in an instant, while she lay there in a heap in the half-light on the floor of her lab, numb to the very core of her being. Cold inertia seeped through her skin and muscles, biting deep, but it was nothing to the cold inside. She felt she was turning to stone, sagging into the floor, melding with it, inanimate.

_This is what it's like to be dead…_ she thought.

The thought jarred her through the quiet. Hard.

There was a stinging pain on her right forearm that cut through the emptiness like a knife.

She suddenly drew in a deep breath through her mouth and bolted upright off the floor, jerking back to life like a marionette on a string. Her muscles ached and her joints screamed with stiffness from laying so long on the cold tile, but she struggled to her feet anyway, pulling up on the work bench, panting, tears streaming down her cheeks.

_I can't control it... I can't..._

Hadn't she decided, all along, that she would choose the rain? To cool Loki's fury, as Alexa put it? The tears flowed more freely. She'd been so certain, because the beast, the mindless chaotic rage, couldn't be the right choice.

But this…

_This is worse… this is worse…_

Her hand lashed out, curling her fingers viciously around the golden disc, pressing the edges of the runework into her skin. She raised her arm to throw it away, shatter it against the wall, destroy it in defiance of that horrible pictures her mind painted, and the impossible choice in front of her: to become a monster, or to die inside…

_Craven. Coward. Selfish. Liar. Beast._

_ This is who I am._

"… _he might be more… so might you…" _

Jane whipped her head around to glimpse the last flash of green light on her arm as it died away, like a rat scurrying back into its hole.

Her arm trembled for an instant, and her eyes fell closed. She could feel it pressing against her palm. The form of all her hope.

She brought the disc down and opened them again to stare hard at the rune _sowulo_, the healing sun. Her fingers tightened around the disc again, and she closed her eyes again, bringing the symbol to her lips like a silent prayer.

"What am I going to do?"

There was only one person who really knew what this was. What she was supposed to do. And he wouldn't answer her.

"Damn it, Loki…" she whispered brokenly, curling her aching body around the golden disc as her tears scoured her face. "What are you _waiting_ for?"

.

* * *

_A small, helpless sigh escaped between the king's lips as that name fell from hers. Despite the white hot coal of impotent fury that burned in him as he watched her fighting for her soul, the sound of it on her tongue would forever kiss his senses as a decadent indulgence. He loved the shape of her mouth when she made the 'o' sound, and the crisp edge in her tone when she voiced the 'k'. _

_Someday, he thought wistfully, he would bind her to his bed and make say it over and over and over, just so that he could watch her lovely mouth form the syllables. Someday… _

_He closed his unfathomable eye as his chest constricted painfully with longing._

_Longing to hold her someday. _

_Longing to comfort her now. _

_Neither was possible as things stood in this moment. And he could not interfere. If she could not choose this on her own…. _

"_Nothing is born with out pain," he reminded himself. The longer she suffered, the stronger the outcome would be… but the harder it became to remember. But he must… he must… "I'm waiting for _you_, Jane," he whispered across the light years. "Hurry."_

_._

* * *

Jane startled awake that night, gasping as she fought her way free of her nightmares – the same nightmare, the tunnel, the precipice, the choice between being run down by the charging beast or throwing herself out into the soul-killing rain - and looked wildly around the room.

Beside her, Thor slept deeply, snoring lightly. Otherwise she was alone.

There was nothing there. Nothing to wake her. Only the feeling of being watched. Craved. Hunted.

"Is that you…" she whispered to the moonlit shadows, "…Loki?"

For a moment, for some reason, she wasn't sure…

Loki wouldn't dare show up with Thor beside her, she reminded herself. Despite her miserable desperation for him to show himself, she somehow felt that the eyes she felt crawling under her skin must never be allowed to peer at her up close. She would fall into them and be swallowed whole…

_He won't come here. _After all the trouble he'd gone to, to make her complicit in his secrecy, after all this time, there was no way he would risk exposure now, just to stand in the shadows and watch her sleep.

Even so, she gripped the rune pendant like a lifeline as she settled back into her pillow, her eyes flicking skittishly from shadow to shadow. They seemed to writhe and stretch, monsters in the dark warring with the monsters inside, and she in their midst, exposed, naked, with nowhere to hide. The spike of pain and the ringing in her ears barely registered at all now through the haze of fear. And beyond it, the siren's song of the rain remained constant but muted, promising to take away the pain, in exchange for everything else.

Loki wasn't a ghost; she didn't believe in ghosts. But he was haunting her more effectively than any ghost could.

"_You are cursed…"_

Jane felt despair creep over her like a pall, so much like the rain as it deadened her, but stealing none of the pain or fear.

"I can't go on like this," she whispered bitterly as the night seemed to loom around her. She felt stripped bare. It was too much. "I just can't."

From the pit of her soul, naked, unbalanced and alone, she whispered it, a command that, unbeknownst to her, made the mark on her forehead pulse and leap with the power it had found sleeping and awoken there:

"Do something. Or leave me alone."

.

* * *

_In the silence of the deep beneath the golden palace, pulsing at the heart of the Realm Eternal, an ageless blue spider waited upon its web. _

_The strands of that web stretched to the ends of the universe, and just beyond. The vibration of each strand, touching each place in the universe, resonated with that place's energy, movement, voice and thought. All of it sang back along the silken strands, connecting everything together, and everything to the center where the spider sat. Waiting. Learning. Knowing. _

_ Time had no meaning. And form almost as little as time. _

_But there had been a time, before, when a mind had drawn close. The blue spider had no thought and no life, but the form and life of that mind had reflected in the spider, and the spider had become a star, gathering all its vast strands in to shine with cold pure power. _

_That mind had gone, and in the uncounted course of ages, the star lost its cohesion and slowly the spider had emerged again, stretching its slender threads out into the fabric of existence once more._

_Then had come another mind, possessed of delusion and grandeur, and the spider had reflected it to become a dragon, vomiting fire on anything that stood before it to glut itself on destruction. That mind had gone as well, and the dragon had shed its scales as silken strands, and in the cold and deep where it fell, the spider had regained its form._

_ Then had come yet another mind, this one, hungry and fixed, and in its reflection, the spider had become a door through which obsession had poured like molten lead. That mind retreated at length, but the spider had no time to regain its form. _

_ For immediately there came a fourth mind, and this mind was unlike the others. _

_It was the mind of a slave and a king, and it reflected the duality. In its reflection, the spider became a lover, desperate, jealous, awed, broken and strengthened by longing._

_Then, absurdly, the mind brought with it more minds, and more, and more, drawing them close so that each reflected weakly off of the lover's facets, giving it a depth and dimension never before conceived of. It was no longer _all_ things, nor was it _one_ thing. It became _many_ things without being _everything_. And in this newness, it grew to hunger. _

_The lover reflected the king's mind, and the king's mind loved a mortal thing called a woman. So the spider that had been a star and a dragon and a door and a lover, craved the mortal woman as well. And because it had become many things, but not everything, it learned to covet. _

_ In time, the mind of the king began to slip away, breaking it bonds one by one, and draping the lover in slave chains of its own. But the lover that reflected the king knew longing for the first time, and it wanted to remain as it was, to preserve its form. To preserve its desire, and seek the fulfill that desire. It wanted to possess the mortal, as the reflection of the king had taught it to do._

_ So it had kept its grip on the king's mind, even as it slid back into the form of a spider, wrapping its silken strands around the king's magic, holding him even as they separated and the mind ceased to reflect. _

_ Ever patient, as time had no meaning, it waited _

_And in time, the king drew close enough to the mortal thing, body against body, skin against skin… the press of lips to the skin of her forehead in a brush that may or may not have been an accident, as the black fire of the brother entity known by some minds as Aether raged around them… And it was in that time that the spider was at last able to ensnare her with its web as well. _

_But it was no longer a lover that craved the mortal. It was a spider that had learned how to covet. And so the mortal became the spider's prey._

_It bound her well, so that not even the king that stood between the spider and the mortal could unbind the strands without destroying her. And slowly it began to pull her close. _

_The spider longed for the day she would stand close enough to reflect._

_The spider longed to know what it would become before it devoured her._

_But the king was wily, and knew the spider's tricks like his own. He could not unbind the strands, and so, through long effort in secret, he twisted the spider's own magic against it, and shaped it around the mortal thing so that it formed a balance scale weighted by two rival entities – a shape that the spider had never been, and so a shape that the spider could not fathom. _

_Caught between the two forms it had never reflected before, it could only push at the tangled knots the king had tied in its pristine web, while the mortal woman struggled to keep the scales from tipping over inside her. _

_But it was learning, learning. _

_It was so close, so close._

_And it had burrowed deep into the mortal's being, drawing her near from within as she struggled like a fluttering fly, becoming ever more entangled. And in those depths, it had found the core of her. The lifeblood of her mind, sweet and potent and tantalizing. The spider's strands cut into it until it bled, little jewels of it seeping up the strands, wetting the balance scale and the forms waiting upon each balance tray, and trickling back along the web to where the spider waited._

_Now the blue spider's strands vibrated across the light years, and the words of the mortal reached him, and the sleeping power inside her dripped teasingly along its plains, and the desire of her mind, so close, so close, closer than ever before…_

_For just an instant, it reflected from spiders edges. _

"Do something. Or leave me alone."

_The spider reflected the choice it was given, as it reflected anything that drew near. That was what it did. And in the light of her command, it made a choice._

_The spider would not leave her alone. _

_The spider had learned to covet, and it had no reason to do anything else. _

_So instead, it did something. _

_Softly, softly, it began to pluck the strings of its web; the web that reached to the ends of the universe and just beyond… and to every point in between. Each strand resonated out into the void, out into the worlds. _

_Out into the minds around the mortal. An insidious, creeping desire. A reflection of its own hunger. _

_Give her to me, it sang without words or sound. Crave her. Fear her. Steal her balance. Make her choose what form I will take._

_The tension would break. The balance would shatter. The mortal would choose: submit, or dominate. And either way, she would fall._

_The scales would unbalance. The strands would pull tight. The spider would feast. _

_And through her, become the rain. Or the beast._

.

* * *

**TBC**

**.**

* * *

**A/N: **Dat dat daaa… let the boss fight commence!

Several reviewers have said they have been feeling lost, which is totally understandable, since I've laid out so many threads, but I hope one or two questions were answered in this chapter; the next chapter should answer a few more! Since the Tesseract doesn't think like the rest of us, it can be kind of a confusing narrator, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask, and I will do my best to respond in a timely manner!

One very insightful reviewer compared Jane's condition to a brain tumor. It's an excellent metaphor for the "beast" aspect of _uruz. _For the rain, I would compare it to drug use. People often use drugs to escape from their negative feelings, but an addiction can kills the good with the bad, and leave you an empty shell.

Neither is a healthy situation for Jane. What do you think she will choose? Let me know in your review!

Seriously though, next chapter, clash of the titans. Loki's mark, against the Tesseract's magic, against Alexa's mark and the Solbergs' magic, and Jane caught in the middle of a tug of war... where will chips fall? One way to find out! More to come soon!


	7. Chapter 7

**Disclaimer**: The characters and original story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe do not belong to me; this story is not for sale or profit.

**A/N: **Some action, at last! Before you read, I highly recommend listening to the song _Control the Storm_ by Delain; it meshes uncannily with this phase of the story, sets the mood nicely! Many thanks to the lovely isaalacrymosaa for sharing it with me!

Thank you so much to all of my reviewers, and to everyone who continues to follow the story, please enjoy this next installment!

.

* * *

"_**Don't you know? In the end  
You're no stronger of hand  
You are no stronger of heart  
Don't you know? In the end  
We'll be tragically torn apart  
If you can't control the storm…"**  
-Delain_

_._

* * *

Jane was lost.

She had abandoned the deserted confines of her lab twenty minutes ago in search of sunlight, despondent and hungry to recapture that elusive calm she had experienced in the park with Thor. Though it had only been three days, it felt like she'd lived an eternity in a cave or a basement, someplace no natural light could penetrate. Day or night, it made no difference; the world was growing dimmer and more distant with each passing hour, shrinking on all sides as though she were being dragged backwards down a narrow tunnel. The shadows loomed fantastically around her wherever she went. Her mind drifted. Concentration had become almost an alien concept, and her thoughts flitted around her head like moths, blurry with motion and hard to catch.

All she knew for certain was that she was watched.

Eyes were always on her now, peering from the shadows. She no longer even startled or darted her gaze around when she felt the fine hairs on the back of her neck raise with awareness. There was no point in looking; she wouldn't see the watcher, and she wouldn't be able to escape. He… _it… _was everywhere.

And somehow… somehow she wasn't sure any longer that it was Loki. It made no sense; there was no logical reason to suspect it. All she knew was that it _felt _different. Different from his dreamlike presence that night in Manhattan. Different from the weight of his gaze when he watched her with unblinking intensity in Alexa's apartment. His eyes had held a heat that had lit her from the inside, so that her cheeks burned in spite of her defensive fear and uncertainty.

This was colder. Hungrier. And it never slept.

It watched her now as she walked along a street she didn't know, searching for familiar landmarks or street signs that were nowhere to be found. She had intended to walk to the nearby park and try to recapture that peace and equilibrium she'd found in the sunshine. It wasn't far; she'd walked past it countless times. There was no way even someone as badly distracted as her could lose her way.

She'd been fine until about five minutes ago, when a wave of whitewashed dizziness had taken her. When it passed, she found hadn't moved an inch farther.

And even so, she didn't know where she was anymore.

Troubled, uncertain, she ducked into a corner store to buy a cup of coffee, hoping it would clear her head. She couldn't possibly be as lost as she felt.

She filled a styrofoam cup and stepped up to the counter to pay.

_Give her to me. _

Jane gasped, dropping her money on the counter, wincing as the words thrummed through her body, so that she heard them with her bones more than her ears.

The cashier was looking at her strangely.

"You alright, ma'am?"

"Did you… hear that?"

"Hear what? I didn't…" The cashier stopped mid-sentence, then closed his mouth, his eyes widening, then narrowing with suspicion. And anger. He didn't speak. Just… stared.

Jane swallowed hard as a wash of goosebumps ran over her skin. Her stomach tightened and something inside her started to quietly scream at her to back away; an animal instinct for self-preservation.

The ringing in her ears crescendoed. The lights in the shop seemed to dim ever-so-slightly, and the cashier startled. His jaw clenched, and she saw his adam's apple bob as he swallowed hard in turn. He gave her a tense, unfriendly look.

"I don't want any trouble," he told her, his voice low and warning. She noticed his hand creep under the counter, where a weapon of some sort was likely concealed. "You… need to go. Right now."

Jane opened her mouth to speak, to reassure him, to ask him what he was thinking and feeling right now... Then she blinked, and closed it. Her hands clenched around her cup as she backed away. She turned and dashed for the door, rushing out to find refuge in the sunlight.

_Crave her. _

Jane cringed as the voice rang through her again, seeming to echo soundlessly off every street, building, car, tree and person. She looked around herself, and couldn't figure out where she was. This wasn't right. She couldn't have gotten so far on foot, but _nothing _looked familiar. It was more than just an unfamiliar place… nothing _looked _right. Nothing looked _normal._

Deeply disturbed, she took a drink of her hot coffee and shivered in the warm sunlight. The buildings seemed to loom, their shadows stretching out to catch. Jane quailed inside and recoiled as they brushed up against her. That darkness would swallow her if she let it cover her.

_Fear her. _

The ringing in her ears was so loud… Where was she?

She was being watched again, but she could see her watchers now. They were everywhere. Everyone in sight was watching her as she rushed along the thinning strip of sunlight on the sidewalk, cringing away from the shifting shadows. Their eyes lingered, unblinking. Jane couldn't meet their stares. Even if she could gather the nerve, something told her it wouldn't be smart. She was reminded uncomfortably of lions crouched in the tall grass, watching a zebra limping at the edge of the herd. Every hair on her body stood on end and the base of her skull prickled with a perception of animosity.

The world seemed to tilt, the buildings swaying inward slightly.

_Steal her balance. _

It would have been bad enough if there was only one or two passers by, but there seemed to be people everywhere, walking the sidewalks, driving in cars, sitting on benches or peering out of shops. All of them paused as she passed, watching her with a burning intensity that spoke to Jane's hind brain. Danger, it said. Be afraid.

Everything seemed to twist and bulge strangely, distorting fluidly like a fun house mirror in motion.

Jane staggered on. Strange looks. Hostile stares. Predatory leers.

The shadows at the edges of her vision began to writhe maniacally.

_Make her choose what form I will take._

Jane stumbled to a halt as everything flashed blue for an instant.

She gasped, reaching up to touch her forehead, unconsciously stroking the spot where _uruz _would be if she could feel it.

For a moment, she wasn't on the street anymore.

She was in that tunnel of grey, fleshy walls, running from the shadows in her own mind.

Then she was back on the street.

People staring. _Everyone_ staring.

She made herself resume walking, trying to ignore the glares, trying to pretend that if she ignored it would go away.

She didn't know what else to do. She didn't know what was going on.

_This is my dream._

"No."

She shook her head, clinging desperately to the last disintegrating shreds of denial. As though on command, the shadows receded and she picked up her pace, staying in the light, as though it might somehow shield her from facing the reality before her. But denying it didn't change the truth. Or the danger.

The ringing in her ears was so loud she could hear herself think. She didn't understand how it was possible, or why it was happening. She didn't understand what was going on. But she knew it was true:

She was being hunted.

.

* * *

_ The king stood still as stone beneath the golden dome of the Bifrost, mere steps from the shores of the cosmic sea. The gatekeeper stood behind him, silent and still as a golden mountain, gleaming sword perched point down upon the raised dais. Neither spoke, the king absorbed in his thoughts, the gatekeeper unwilling to presume, watching with eyes that saw everything._

_ And nothing._

_ "How far does your gaze stretch, Gatekeeper?" the king asked at length, never taking his eyes from the chasm of the cosmic gulf, twinkling with the color and light of its celestial dance against the velvet dark of eternity. "What can you see?"_

"_I can see everything within the branches of Yggdrasil, my king," the gatekeeper replied._

_ "And beyond?" the king asked._

_ "Beyond… is beyond my sight." _

_ "By design? Or limitation?"_

_ "I could not say, my king. I did not craft the spells that made me."_

_ The king stood quiet again for a time, lost in thought as he watched the universe spin._

_ "Do you remember the spells that were woven over your golden apple as a boy?"_

_Behind him, the golden mountain stirred, turning unblinking golden eyes upon the king. And seeing nothing. He responded slowly, his words heavy with reluctant honesty. No Asgardian liked to think of their golden apple._

"_Some, Allfather."_

"_Not all?"_

"_No, my king. I regret that I never excelled in spellcraft. It is perhaps a question better posed to the magic masters."_

"_Those spells were lost during the Ice War."_

"_That is so, my king."_

"_A pity," the king turned his eyes upon the gatekeeper. "There will never be another like you."_

_The gatekeeper said nothing._

"_Record what spells you remember," the king said. "I would have them as soon as they can be thoroughly transcribed."_

"_As you command, my king."_

"_I…"_

_The words died on the king's lips as the cosmos swam before his piercing eye, lights swirling together through the endless night between them. The Bifrost platform dipped and tilted alarmingly. The gatekeeper did not seem to notice._

"_My king?"_

_The king did not hear him. He heard another voice, not with his ears, but with his bones, deep in the foundations of his mind. It was not for him. It merely went through him. Through the threads of magic that tied him to his mortal._

Give her to me. Crave her. Fear her. Steal her balance_. _Make her choose what form I will take.

"_I… have tarried here too long," the king murmured. "I must return. Keep your gaze sharp on the edge of your sight, Guardian. Where the Worlds end. That is where it is most needed now."_

_He strode from the dome and mounted Sleipnir. The eight-legged stallion reared and set off speeding back up the bridge, faster than Memory or Thought, who circled overhead, could fly. Still the king dug his heels in, urging him faster. The world continued to spin with the magic of the command vibrating along his bones, through him, and past him out into the distant blue world where the mortal goddess must even now be under siege. _

_"Curse you..." he whispered to the blue spider crouched beneath the golden palace in the distance.  
_

_He could resist its pull with ease. He had long practice at doing so; and it was not directed at him in any case. But the mortals that dwelt upon the blue speck… the mortals surrounding his beloved…_

_There was nothing he could do. Nothing. He could not leave Asgard unguarded; and even if he decided to throw the Realm Eternal to the wolves and fly to her side, there would be nothing he could do but watch her suffer in person. If he interfered, she would never be free. _

_But if she failed…_

"_Jane…" the king murmured, squeezing his eye closed, giving the stallion its head. "You must control it. I know you can. But now you_ must._ If you don't…"_

_His face slackened as the roar of a hollow ache thundered inside him. He could not even think it. _

_The gleam of the waves far below caught his eye, and he cast a glance out over the waters as the rainbow bridge flew by beneath the strike of his steed's hooves. Unable to stop himself, he traced the fault line where his explosives were seeded. There was one concealed… there another… His face hardened. _

You are fear. You are chaos. You are destruction.

This is who you are.

"_Yes..."_

_But..._

_The fierce flash of warm brown eyes, a sweet laugh, the shine yellow sunlight on soft hair, the curve of a full, sweet mouth smiling at the secrets unfolding inside the dancing curiosity of a dexterous mind; a goodness and integrity that could not fail. _

_A light in the darkness._

_His fear sharpened to a fine point, but a calm settled over his mind._

"_I believe in you…"_

_She was the key. To everything. She would not fail. She would find the secret to tame the beast. And if she didn't…_

"_Find the right choice," he begged her quietly, seeing her in his mind's eye while he bent over the stallion, riding it harder still to the golden throne, so that he could see her in truth. "Or nothing will ever matter again."_

_._

* * *

_If the king were on his throne, and if he were not so preoccupied with his mortal, he might have cast his eyes just a little to the left, and he might have spied a second floor living space full of sleeping children in one room, and sleeping adults in another._

_ In the second, he would have seen the young woman, Jana, pacing and crying, clasping shaking hands in front of her as she stared down at her elders. He may have noted that the green light around them had begun to glow more brightly, moving in a steady, nearly tangible flow into the central woman, and then skyward, fading to invisibility before it reached the ceiling, flowing away towards the spell it fueled. _

_He may also have noted that they had all grown pale and drawn, that sweat beaded on their brows, that their breathing came in short, shallow pants, and that there was blood seeping from several of their mouths and noses. They were fading, failing, the combined strength of their diluted Asgardian bloodline not nearly powerful enough to withstand the demands of maintaining such a spell any longer._

_ "Gods, gods, gods…" he might have heard Jana whimper as she stared at the blood on her mother's face. "Please… please come back, please…"_

_ Then he would have seen her close her eyes and gather herself. He would have seen a calm steal over her as she reached a decision. He would have seen her walk slowly out into the larger room out front, scribble down a short note to one of her cousins, leaving it on the kitchen counter as she drew a knife out of one of the drawers, and walk back into the room with the dying adults. Locking the door behind her. _

_Then he would have seen her clamber down onto the mattress beside her mother, tears streaming from her wide eyes. _

"_I'm sorry," he might have heard her say, as she wiped the blood away from her mother's mouth. "I know I was supposed to take care of them. I know you think I'm too young. But I _can't _just stand here and watch you die. Not when you're doing this for the kids… for me… Not when I can help!"_

_Then, if the king were looking, he might have seen her press the blade against her palm, and, with a few halting hesitations and a few more tears, draw a thin, red line of blood across it. And he might have seen the ruby drops spark and glint with a brilliant sheen of green more vivid and vibrant than any of the others._

"_I'm sorry I didn't tell you…" he would hear her tell her mother's still form._

_He would then have seen her press a tearful kiss to her mother's pale cheek, lay her head down, and lay her bloody palm against her Aunt Alexa's arm. He would have seen the green glow grow around her like a growing blaze and watched it feed into the flow of the other. _

_His brow might have tightened with pain to hear her murmur, "Queen Frigga, watch over me…", and would have watched her gasp, her eyes growing wide, before they rolled back and fell closed. _

_The king might have seen this all, but he did not. _

_After he had barred the doors to the throne room, he had all but thrown himself onto the throne, and now his piercing eye focused with unwavering intensity on his beloved mortal goddess. _

_On the Tesseract's blue magic coursing, invisible, insidious, through the world around her, urging anything that lived and moved to converge on her._

_On the same magic that pulsed, incarcerated, in the mark he had fashioned for her on her brow, an absolute protection that would turn against anything that unsettled her by turning it against itself, and that would soon turn against her as well if she could not control it._

_On the same woman upon whom the Solbergs, young and old, now poured their strength, magic, and all their hope, at the risk of their very lives. _

_All of them silently begging of her the same thing._

"_Norns, be kind," king breathed. "Jane, please… make the right choice."_

_._

* * *

The attacks began slowly. Small things. People scowling at her. Muttering insults or threats as she walked by. Bumping her with their shoulders. Shoving her aside as they moved past. They were gone too quickly for her to react.

Or else she would have figured it out sooner, and at long last: the nature of the protection that _uruz _provided.

The assaults became more intense as Jane moved more quickly through the unknown streets, glancing furtively over her hunched shoulders, walking as fast as her feet would carry her without actually running. Every hair on her body was standing on end, every instinct telling her to run and hide. Like a prey animal knows the shadow of the thing that it will eat it without ever seeing the predator that cast it, she knew she was being stalked for the kill. She was a rabbit fleeing through a forest filled with hawks, wolves, and snakes, all slavering for a mouthful of her.

A group of unattended school children, still in their uniforms and backpacks as they walked home, started throwing pencils and wadded up bits of paper at her back, shouting childish taunts at her. Her forehead burned and she whirled around and pinned them with an unfriendly look. The instant her eyes fell on them, they dropped the projectiles in their hands and scattered, bursting into tears as they ran into shops and around nearby buildings.

Two old women seated at a wrought-iron table outside a café called her rude names in faux whispers, and one upended her cup of tea onto the sidewalk, nearly dousing Jane's legs in the scalding liquid. "Excuse me!" Jane snapped tersely, more angry at the pressure behind her eyes than the woman's seeming carelessness, and watched, miserably wary and nonplussed, as the women hunched their shoulders and clutched their handbags more tightly in their laps, watching her with scandalized expressions on their pinched faces, as though fearing she'd try to mug them.

A few steps later, a teenage boy in a rock and roll tee-shirt stuck his foot out to trip her. She stumbled, pinwheeling her arms, her coffee flying out of her hands to splatter on the pavement. She whimpered, angry and embarrassed and turned to tell him off as he offered her an ugly sneer while his friends laughed at her. Both the sneer and the laughter quickly fell away as the ringing in her ears spiked and the shadows of the buildings stretched out unnaturally over his shoulder. Before she could speak, the boys were off on their skateboards, watching her over their shoulders with sullen, fearful expressions as they fled.

Jane was breathing too fast, and her forehead was on fire. Fear and uncertainty kept her from questioning what was going on, or she might have talked herself into calling it a streak of bad luck and paranoia. But the shadows were reaching, and she didn't have the luxury of a free moment to rationalize. She could only accept what was in front of her.

Something was hunting her.

Hunting the beast. _Uruz. _

And the beast, somehow, was driving them all back.

In her mind, she saw pixels on a screen, the fearsome image of the aurochs charging the hunter.

…_in legend, it embodied the epitome of wildness and the danger that nature presents to mankind, despite all our efforts to tame it… known to have extremely aggressive temperaments. Killing one was seen as a great act of courage in ancient cultures…_

_Mankind fears the aurochs. The aurochs is fear._

Uruz _is fear… _

_What better protection, than to be the scariest monster in the nightmare…?_

Jane looked around wildly, gasping for breath through the tightening in her throat. The people on the street glared back. Furious and predatory. And under that, afraid.

Enemies.

Hunters.

The shadows of the buildings lengthened again, spreading across her path like liquid darkness reaching out to embrace her. Jane skittered back from them, catching her foot on the curb as she stumbled into the street. A horn blared and she shrieked as a car screeched to a halt millimeters from her left hip. Dizzied, she leaned on the hot hood, searching through the rising terror for some solution, some escape, some way out.

"What the hell is wrong with you!" the driver snarled, throwing his car door open, his face contorted with rage.

Jane looked up at him from under her brow, her eyes wide and hard with fear. From the corners of her vision the shadows writhed, bowing inward like tentacles made of ink to wrap themselves over the car. The driver didn't seem to notice. He was staring at her, white as a sheet at whatever he saw burning in her eyes.

"Shit… Jesus Christ, what…"

Jane shook her head, frightened by that frightened look. _I'm not a monster, _she wanted to say._ I'm not the beast. I'm just a person, just like you… _She pushed herself upright and took a hesitant step forward, reaching out, begging wordlessly. The driver nearly tripped over his own feet backing away.

"Please…" Jane said, her voice pleading.

"No! Don't hurt me!" the driver shrilled, raising his hands. "Just take it. Take it!"

He turned without another word and ran, abandoning the car with the door still open and the engine running.

They were hunting her, but when she turned her attention on them – the eyes of the beast - they became the prey. It wasn't right. It was so hard to think but she knew, she _knew _that she wasn't a predator.

_Yes you are. Choose. This is who you are._

"She's stealing that car!" someone shouted, anger and disgust twisting the words into something ugly, even though Jane had made no move to do so. "Somebody stop her! Call the police!"

That cry was a pebble setting off an avalanche. Jane dashed a glance around her. A crowd was gathering from all sides, just a few short torches and a rope short of a lynch mob, and to her eyes they all seemed to loom and contort strangely with the shadows of the buildings, distorting hideously in the edges of her vision, only to morph back into normal men, women and children when she looked at them head on.

Terrified people.

Enraged people.

And yet… not…

There was a glazed, ravenous glitter in their eyes as they converged on her, abandoning their bags and brief cases on the side walks, dropping their coffee cups or candy bars from careless fingers, pulling their cars over and getting out to stalk closer with singular, hostile intent. As they zeroed in on her, dozens of sets of eyes pinning her with the same deadly focus, it seemed as though one mind ruled them. One compulsion making them mindless as zombies. And just as hungry.

As one, their eyes flashed with blue fire.

Her gut clenched and her heart hammered. What was _happening_?

There was a small break in the crowd to her left. She didn't stop to think; she ran for it, pushing past anyone who tried to stand in her way. Many recoiled, screaming, as though she truly were a charging aurochs. A brave few reached out for her, grabbing at her clothes, yanking at her hair, scratching at her arms, striking at her back.

"Don't!" Jane screamed.

Her voice sounded no different to her ears, but the people reacted as though it were a lion's roar, scrambling back, pushing and knocking each other over in a desperate bid to get away, only to stop, hovering, several feet from her, torn between their fear and their rage. Between running from her, and trying to kill her.

She wanted to stop, reach out to them, reason with them, beg them to open their eyes and see _her_, but deep down she knew they couldn't. They couldn't.

Something had gone wrong with the universe, and all they could see was prey. The beast.

So she ran.

_They do see you. Choose. This is who you are._

She made it around two corners and into a wide alley between two old brick buildings before it hit her.

The thoughts that were going through her head… The ones that dogged her constantly, shaming and harrying her whenever she tried to think around them… They had changed.

_This is who you are._

Not '_this is who I am_'… not anymore.

How often, it suddenly occurred to her to wonder, had she thought that phrase in the past weeks? Often enough to disturb her, strongly enough that she had denied it out loud more than once…

Now…

_Choose. This is who you are._

A chill ran up her spine. The thought wasn't her own... Someone was speaking inside her mind, with her own mental voice...

"What is this…" she seethed, breathing too hard, furious so that she didn't have to face the horror of it. "Loki, what have you…"

An instant later, her rage faltered. No… no that wasn't right.

The ache behind her eyes and the ringing in her ears tried to subsume her, and her forehead burned so hot that she reached up, certain she would encounter flames, but she battled it all back with a ferocious feat of will. She had to _think…_

The eyes flashing with blue light. The cold black shadows. The pull to hunt her. The push to fear her.

Duality.

There was more than one force at work here. More than one _will_… And it was all part of _uruz… _

_No… that's not right either… think.._

Loki had said the mark wasn't to control her.

_"You are not meant to be ruled…"_

Loki's word wasn't worth much but…

Jane made herself stop, panting, and leaned against the dirty brick wall of the alley to pull the golden disc out of her pocket. _Hagalaz _still hung around her neck. It had been her life line. But somehow, sometime, without her knowing it, the golden sun had become her talisman. She stared at it, weighing her logic, her intuition and her instincts. And on some level, her faith.

She'd believed the runes were asking her for an alliance; asking her to choose his side. And she still did. But now… a new meaning arose from _naudiz, gebo _and _sowulo._ A need to be filled, a gift that breeds loyalty, and the healing sun… she stared at the runes in her hand.

Reading the riddle yet again in a new way.

If the mark was not meant to control her… if it really was meant to protect her, as Loki said, and as the evidence bore out… What if…

"Why did he use blue magic instead of green?" she whispered to the shadows. What _if… _"The blue magic of the Tesseract… the Tesseract he hates and fears… he said so... so..."

What if he hadn't had a choice?

A wild idea was forming within the chaos inside her mind, jumping at shadows as she battled down her rising temper. What if it wasn't just external danger it was supposed to protect her from? The mark was Loki's creation. But the _magic_ came from… _the Tesseract!_

Loki's voice echoed out of that stormy night and the quiet of the hotel room.

"…_my want of you was touched by the whispers of the Tesseract itself… there was no part of me that hideous blue fire did not singe…"_

Her memory showed her the reflection of the mark in Alexa's mirror. _Uruz _was the _shape _of the magic. But the magic itself… shining out from inside as though… as though it had already _been there_ before her skin had been cut open to reveal it…

Her eyes widened. Clutching the golden disc so hard that her hand shook, she tilted her head back and turned them towards the sky, and the vast expanse of the universe that lay invisible beyond. She could be wrong… but what if… what if...

The world flashed blue once more, and once again images of the dream overlaid waking reality. She was cowering against the spongy wall of the dream tunnel; the fissure in the brain. The beast was coming, rising from the pit to chase her down. She could see its shadow looming from around the bend, growing longer and darker by the moment.

There was no way to be sure who or what was attacking her. But it seemed clear that the beast was there to protect her, and someone… _something_ out there… was knowingly calling it up out of the depths, and turning it against the people around her.

Faces flashed through her memory; the sour man in the blue blazer, the curvy girl in the park; Darcy, her eyes wide with fear; the children crying, the boys fleeing, the old women recoiling, the driver running from her.

All of them being pulled and pushed like marionettes. Used like they didn't matter. Moved around the board like pawns, their free will, peace of mind, and safety sacrificed for pieces that someone else thought were more important.

A hot, righteous anger that had nothing to do with _uruz _blossomed to tighten her chest and suffuse her blood, settling in to straighten her spine. Nothing about this was right. Nothing about this was okay. She couldn't let this go on.

Not when there might be something she could do about it.

She could smell the rain, somewhere nearby. Close enough to reach out and touch.

A cloying terror tried to close her throat as she remembered the feeling of sinking into the floor like so much slaughtered meat, dead of all sensation or care, utterly inert… Tears tried to start in her eyes, but she blinked them back.

_Courage. _Hadn't she faced worse things than this? _No… _that was the trouble. All of the enemies she'd faced – SHIELD, the Destroyer, the Kursed, Malekith, even the Aether – were something she could _fight. _The rain was inside her; there was nothing to oppose; it wasn't the enemy, it was the solution. All she could do was surrender to it, and that was far more terrifying.

Her stomach clenched with fear, and she defied it. She couldn't let this happen. She _couldn't_ give in without a fight.

In the vision of the tunnel, her mind filled with the stinging cold, and she could smell the rain nearby. She turned her head, and saw the tunnel's end, and beyond it, the storm. Banishing fear like ripping off a band-aid, she pushed forward and ran to the precipice, stumbling to a halt on the brink. Steadying herself with a hand on the crusty white rim of the hole in the cliff face, she made herself stand still and let the rain sting her.

The ringing in her ears dimmed. The tips of her ears and fingers felt numb as the rain began to mist through her.

In the waking world, she shivered and clutched the golden disc closer as the anesthetic cold began to tingle across her skin.

"Who… _what_ are you?" she demanded of the empty sky, even though on some level she already knew. "What do you _want_?"

"I'll start with that shiny toy you've got in your hand, sweetheart," a gravely voice replied.

Jane startled and whipped her head around to find herself surrounded. In her struggle against the enemy inside, she'd forgotten about the dangers without. Hard-eyed, dangerous-looking men melted out of the shadows around her, circling her narrow little patch of sunlight like wolves creeping up through the darkness on a dying campfire.

"What… what do you want?"

The speaker stepped forward; a stocky, broad-shouldered man with a shadow of whiskers and cold, hollow, predatory eyes. She heard a soft, distinctive click, and her eyes went wide as they darted down to see a huge silver gun in his hand, the hammer cocked.

Oddly, her first thought was that it was a beautiful weapon, clearly custom made, too pretty to have such an ugly purpose. She didn't know why she thought so; probably because she was too numb to think of anything else. The rain was still creeping up on her, stealing her fury and her fear. But when he ran his hand over the length of the gun in a gesture that struck Jane as somehow sexual, even the rain could not hold back the wash of visceral horror it evoked. Her stomach clenched with a new kind of fear as she realized fully the position she was in, and her eyes darted around the closing circle, and she saw in an instant that several of the men were armed; a knife, a crowbar, a length of steel cord...

"You don't listen very well, do you?" the man said softly, a poisonous mockery of sweetness curdling his tone as he stepped into her – scorning her helplessness. He smelled like old cigarettes and whiskey. She cringed away from him, clinging to the scent of rain as she felt the beast begin to rise. He struck out, grabbing her chin hard in his free hand. She wanted to shove him away, but her arms and legs felt numb now, and she had to lean against the building just to remain upright. "I'll teach you to heed me." He dug his fingers into her face and gave her head a rough shake before he let go. "I said, I'll start with that pretty trinket. And then…" his eyes raked down her body, and flashed blue for an instant. She began to shiver as he raised the massive gun to run the length of the barrel along her cheek and down her neck, so that the end of it nestled under her jaw. "…we'll just see where we go from there."

The other men chuckled darkly and exchanged a knowing look amongst themselves, some smirking, others leering, yet others losing all expression, their eyes dead of human compassion, divorcing themselves from what they were about to do. It was clear this wasn't the first time they had done this. Jane swallowed hard as she realized they weren't like the others. At least, not entirely. Maybe they had been drawn in by whatever was attacking her. Maybe it had them in its grip too. But these men were predators by nature. By choice.

She glanced hastily up the alley, and saw no one on the street in either direction. No one was coming. She wasn't sure they'd help her now if they did. She was struck again with that wild idea that she'd had during the storm that night in Manhattan; if there were thunder, if it could reach her, Thor would appear to protect her. But there was no thunder. Only a dwindling patch of sunlight and the growing shadows. She was alone.

"Hand it over."

The man with the gun reached for the golden disc. Jane's fingers tightened reflexively around it. Something in her, something afraid and irrational, felt suddenly that if she could hold onto it, she could survive this. He tried to pry it from her fingers. When she resisted, he laughed, for all the world like a cat batting around a mouse that it was in no hurry to eviscerate, and the sound made her want to cry, even though she could no longer feel panic through the creeping quiet of the rain rising inside.

His hand abandoned the disc and instead found her breast, pinching it roughly through the fabric of her shirt, removing any lingering doubt about what he intended to do to her.

"No!" she whimpered, shoving him back, letting her fingernails rake at his arm as she did so, and clutching the gold disc tighter to her chest, feebly shielding it and her body at the same time. She was so numb now, the sensation of the rain washing away the pain and anger. All that was left of her was a blunted knot of fear, and even that was beginning to fade to grey around the edges.

"Stupid woman," the man spat, hissing at the red lines she'd drawn on his forearms. Drawing back the hand with the gun, he brought it down hard across her face.

Jane cried out as her head was knocked sideways against the brick and the world danced and swam with stars. She tasted the blood on her tongue. The golden disc slipped from her fingers, clattering onto the pavement. She saw it, as though from a long way off, roll away between the legs of her attackers to clatter to a halt against the far wall of the alley. Her eyes shifted and fell on one of the men turning a six inch blade in his hand, as though eager to do something with it. She saw another tugging his belt loose from its buckle, and beginning to work on the button of his denims.

"Don't you get it?" the ringleader said, derisive laughter and a mock disbelief in his gravely voice. "She doesn't get it, boys."

They all laughed ominously along with their leader, closing in around her, their eyes shining with blue light. The ringleader turned back to her, his face twisted with an ugly sneer.

"You don't have a choice."

The words hit her like fist in the gut. She sucked in a deep breath, her eyes widening and her lips parted.

In the distance, she heard the ringing start up in her ears once more. The pain behind her eyes throbbed with the beat of her heart.

_Choose._

If she didn't do something, she was going to die here.

_Choose._

Jane raised her face and met the man's menacing gaze. Her fear was gone. So were her doubts. But she was no longer numb.

Her eyes were hard. They flashed with blue fire.

She had no choice?

_Choose._

"Yes," she hissed. "I do."

The scent of rain slipped away, and she let it go.

A breeze stirred the air around them as the ringing in her ears returned and ramped up. But this time she heard it differently, and knew it for what it was – the enraged bovine roar of the charging beast. The ache behind her eyes became a pressure, a press of something straining to break free.

The expression on the man's face changed. Went blank. Then drew in. The others had stopped advancing, and they were glancing amongst each other, uncertain. The ringleader backed away a few steps. Shaking his head, he startled back and raised the gun.

"Goddamn bloody bitch," he snarled, but his voice faltered, and he inched back, retreating even as he tried to intimidate her. The wind picked up, swirling around them in buffeting gusts. "You… stop it. Fucking stop it! You… damn it… you do as you're told!"

Jane, blue fire burning visible on her brow and flashing like hellfire in the dark of her pupils, didn't bat an eye as she stared past the black hole of the barrel leveled at her face. She didn't care about it. She didn't care about what was happening to her, to the people around her, to the natural order of the universe. She didn't care who might get hurt, or who might be doing the hurting.

But not because of the rain. The rain was long gone now, distant as a dream.

She wasn't numb now. She was _angry_. They had touched her. Laughed at her. Hurt her.

And they were not going to touch her. Ever. Again.

She stepped away from the wall, farther into the alley, into the wind which climbed to a furious howl. They retreated further, battered back by the onslaught of the wind, which danced through her hair, raising it to slither around her head like snakes. She watched, fascinated from beyond the borders of her rage, as a pulsing blue radiance flickered out of her flesh to shine over them, painting their now undeniably fearful expressions in cold sapphire hues. She advanced another step, and watched a shadow fall across them, as though from behind her, deeper black than the shadows of the alley, wide enough to swallow them all.

A shadow with lyre-shaped horns.

Jane knew that if she looked over her shoulder, there would be nothing there. _Uruz_ was not behind her. It was inside her.

The shadows rose like black geysers, triumphant, to sluice over everything in sight. The sun still shone overhead, but the blue sky faded to black as its light was swallowed, overpowered and defeated. The yellow inferno of the sun was still visible in the sky. But it had no power to illuminate here any longer. Night fell within the alley.

And still the shadow with lyre-shaped horns cast a darker black over the men who had thought to harm her. Painted with blue flame, they cried out, some cowering against the far wall, others falling to their knees, some holding up their hands in mortal terror, others simply frozen with fear, like mice under the gleaming blue talons of a hawk. None of them thought to run. Who could run from this? This was _uruz, _the aurochs, the beast that had embodied all primal fear, the creeping horror of the darkness beyond the edge of the campfire, the death of any who stood before it. The shadow that is the last thing the prey sees before claws and fangs and mortal agony steal their sight. They could do nothing but cower and wait to be eaten.

Jane cast her eyes around the circle of moaning, trembling, whimpering men, until they fixed with cruel finality upon the ringleader. Their eyes met, and she stared down into his terror.

"No…" he whispered. Begged. "No, please, no…" he backed away, shaking his head desperately, wavering like a brittle leaf about to fall. "Please, God, no… no… Don't! No!" Tears leaked from his eyes, clinging to the stubble on his cheeks and shining blue in the fire.

There was a stinging on her arm, pulling ineffectually at her attention. Jane ignored it.

_Liar. Cheater. Jealous. Ruthless. Selfish. Guilty. Betrayer. _

_Angry, cruel, vengeful, dangerous. Beast. _

_This is who you are._

Jane cocked her head, studying the violent man in front of her, reduced to this gibbering wreck through fury and fire. She didn't see a human being anymore, just a contemptible braying creature quivering with fear. She took another experimental step towards him.

"NO!" he shrieked, "Not that! God, not that! NO!"

Blue fire flashed on sliver as the gun swung up and exploded in the darkness, the flash quickly swallowed by unnatural night. There was a deafening report. The men screamed and cringed, afraid of everything that moved or sounded under the shadow of _uruz._

Blood sprayed across Jane's face.

The man before her slumped to the ground in a twitching heap. Safe now forever from the fear of the beast. The side of his face was gone, a ragged meaty hole glistening wetly in its place. The silver gun, smoke still rising from its massive barrel, clattered from his dead fingers onto the pavement.

Jane reached up to touch her forehead. She could feel the hot outline of _uruz _burning there. Her hand came away shaking, covered in sticky red, little chunks of red and gray tissue clinging to her fingertips. She shook her head as tears started in her eyes.

"This isn't me…"

She looked around herself again at the men arrayed around her in fear, shivering in the aberrant night-black wind, most of them on the ground, their legs unable to hold them under the weight of mind-stealing dread. The beast, sated with its kill, let her see clearly for a moment.

These were terrible people. Thieves. Murderers. Rapists. Evil. They deserved to be afraid. They deserved to be devoured.

One man was curled up against the wall, biting his nails down to the quick until they bled. Another sat rocking back and forth, staring sightlessly. A third appeared to be praying, tears streaming down his face. Another was in danger of crushing his own eyes as he pressed the heels of his hands into the sockets, his head jerking back and forth, so that it was no longer an expression of denial so much as a nervous tick, neurons firing at random as his mind rejected what his senses told him. Several had lost control of their bladders, their pant legs stained dark with wet.

All of them, their eyes flickering with blue fire, stared out of the depths of their own helplessness at her with a hate that rivaled the blaze burning on her brow.

She had done this. Reduced these vicious predators to whimpering, pathetic piles of stinking terror. And they deserved whatever they got. But…

_She_ had done this.

"This _isn't _me."

The world flashed blue.

Again the alley was gone. She was alone in the tunnel in her mind, perched on the precipice. The storm raged outside, lashing stinging cold against her face, and the beast's hot, heaving breath sprayed saliva against the back of her neck.

The world flashed again, and she was back in the alley.

Time stood still, and she saw the choice in front of her with plain, brutal clarity.

The moment had come. _Choose._

She could choose the beast. It would save her life. And she would become something worse than these evil men. A true monster.

Or she could choose to leap into the rain, allow the rage and fear to be washed away, reject the destruction of the aurochs. But the moment these men were free of the beast's fury, they would fall on her like the animals they were and tear her apart. And she would lay there, a lifeless doll, and let them.

The world flashed again, flickering faster and faster between the vision of the tunnel and the reality of the alley, until somehow she could see both worlds at once with her waking eyes. She was in two places at once and running out of time in both.

_This is who you are. Choose._

The words struck a cord in her, ringing with a strange, chilling truth that had not occurred to her before.

"This is who I am?"

Shivering, she slowly turned inside her mind. With growing dread, she made herself look into the beast's rolling, bloodshot eyes.

And knew that the voiceless voice was right.

The beast had risen from inside her. The mark had given it a form, but it wasn't alien to her. Its rage tasted familiar. It was part of her: the culmination of everything she'd ever felt when her peers had shunned her, when her colleagues had laughed at her, when he ex had dumped her like she was nothing, when SHIELD had taken everything from her…

…and yes, when Thor had abandoned her, left her waiting uncertain and alone for two years of her life…

_"It doesn't change you," _Loki's voice whispered insidiously in her mind. _"It reveals you." _She shivered to look into the ugliness of her own darkness, mesmerized. _ "No one should be forced to face themselves as it makes you do…"_

Her forearm stung like the slash of a blade. Jane hissed, distracted, and glanced down. The shimmering green light of _laguz _had flared to life on her skin. It seemed… dimmer than it had before. Fainter. But it burned steadily.

_"He is dangerous, but he may be more than that." _Alexa's memory whispered through her. _"And so might you."_

The blue pulsed through the fleshy tunnel walls. Blue lightening flashed in the rain storm at her back. She felt a few drops of rain catch against her shoulders and her hair, clinging like stones and linking together, chains to drag her down into the void.

And that was her too, she realized. The rain was her too.

It was the part of her that had so often let the disappointment or disapproval of others subdue her… Erik… her mother… the part of her that bore the brunt of other peoples' disdain, numbing her as she let their derision and dissatisfaction seep inside, believing them, doubting herself, letting others rule her through shame while sweeping her anger under the rug… and, she saw with a measure of pain, the part of her that numbed the pain of Thor's abandonment so that she could go on with him as though it hadn't happened - so that she could try to build a foundation with him, without having to face it. No wonder she couldn't trust...

These were both her.

_ This is who you are._

_ Choose._

So this was her choice. A hollow, aching gulf opened inside her, and she felt herself weaken. The temptation to fold on herself and give in was nearly overwhelming. Of course this was her choice. These things were her. This was who she was.

_ "Don't you see it?" Laguz _sizzled on her arm, drawing out of her growing despair. _"How little we see ourselves… There is more than one path up the mountain."_

Green light glinted off of gold in the corner of her eye. In the alley, the rune for the healing sun glinted at her from the dirt against the far wall.

Thor's voice, haloed in sunlight, echoed in her mind, drawing her further out of the darkness inside as she furrowed her brow.

_"When we are honest, we see only the worst in ourselves…"_

_"It doesn't change you… it reveals you…"_

_ "…the trick is to seek what is best, while remaining honest."_

Somewhere inside, there was a balance scale swinging wildly, its hanging platforms swaying and jangling. Crashing into each other as it seesawed.

_ "There is more than one way up the mountain."_

The balance platforms swung farther, twisting around each other...

_ Choose._

Jane gasped. And she saw it.

The balance had _two_ sides. But it was still _one_ scale.

_Uruz _wasn't the beast _or _the rain.

It was both the beast _and _the rain.

"This is me…" she whispered. And there it was. Another way up the mountain.

In the tunnel of her mind, she flung one arm out into the raging storm. Rain struck her and clung, linking in heavy globs, solidifying into heavy blue chains that hung with cold, deadening weight on the crook of her arm. The weight pulled her off balance, and she stumbled sideways, teetering precariously over the edge.

The beast snorted furiously at the sight of its quarry moving away. It screamed, lowering its lyre-shaped horns, and charged.

"This…" Jane grunted between gritted teeth, hauling the heavy chains made of rain into the tunnel with her, facing the beast head on, "… is _who I am!_"

With a primal shout, she hurled the chains over the beast's head. They shot deep, farther than her meager strength should have carried them, and snapped hard around the great aurochs horns. The beast roared, its eyes rolling, foam frothing at its maw, as its head was dragged down like an anchor against the spongy tunnel floor.

Jane blinked hard, refocusing on the alleyway as her thoughts suddenly cleared.

_Uruz _still burned on her head, the unnatural night it had created still heavy around her.

But the shadow of the aurochs had vanished.

The men had stopped crying and screaming and rocking. Jane wondered briefly what she must look like to them, standing in a whirlwind of black wind and blue fire, her brow shining and her face painted with blood. They were staring at her, fear and wonder making a strange, alien mix on their faces. She forgot the question a moment later, as her sight cleared and solidified.

Loki stood amongst them.

.

* * *

**TBC…**

**.**

* * *

**A/N: **Loki just loves to turn up for a cliffhanger, doesn't he? Heh heh heh... what do you think? Has Jane found the solution to her problems? Or is this battle just beginning? I really hope this turned out alright, the muse has been beating this chapter into submission with a mallet for over a week now, but it never feels quite finished. I'm depending on you to tell me if he's made a colossal mess of it. Any comments or constructive criticism are most welcome! More story to come soon!


	8. Chapter 8

**Disclaimer**: The characters and original story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe do not belong to me; this story is not for sale or profit.

**A/N: **Thanks to all who have read and reviewed so far! You are my sunshine! Now to let the other shoe fall! Please enjoy!

.

* * *

"_**I want to hide the truth, I want to shelter you,  
But with the beast inside, there's nowhere we can hide;  
Your eyes, they shine so bright, I want to save that light;  
I can't escape this now, unless you show me how."**  
- Imagine Dragons_

.

* * *

Loki's expression was unreadable, but his eyes burned with triumph, ardor and a fierce adoration. Jane's mouth fell open in surprise, unable to tear her eyes from the sight of him standing so still and sure before her, utterly unfazed by the black wind and blue fire.

How long had she waited for him? How often had she wished he'd come? Now here he stood, and in the sudden ringing clarity inside her head, she didn't know what to say to him or what to do.

Her attackers took no notice of the newcomer that had materialized in their midst, either unable to see him, or frightened beyond caring. One of them reached up to shield his eyes from the fire, staring at her now with more amazement than fear, and Jane noticed his arm pass right through the hem of the forest green tunic Loki wore. A twist of relief seeded with something perilously like disappointment threaded through her chest. It wasn't Loki. It was another sending. Here to watch her final battle against herself.

Inside the beast was straining against the chain, tearing deep, ragged gouges in the floor of the tunnel as it struggled to free its horns. Pain spiked as it bucked and screamed, blue flashing and dancing up the tunnel walls in response, and though the silhouette of the aurochs did not reappear, the shadows in the alley writhed through the blue radiance like black tentacles of liquid night. The ringing in her ears distorted unnervingly, reverberating through the balance centers of her brain to make the world tilt and sway like the deck of a ship at sea, and the smell of rain clogged her nostrils almost sickeningly. Jane reeled, her mind in a firestorm, her senses in an uproar. She stumbled drunkenly, her hands came up to grip her head as the beast struggled inside her. The cowering men groaned and cried out and wept, inching away from her.

"Go!" she shouted hoarsely at them. "Go… go to the police or… Just get away from me!"

As though waking suddenly from the clutches of some surreal dream, the men startled and came back to themselves. One by one they scrambled to their feet. Staring, crying, some cursing, some crossing themselves as though to ward off evil, as they abandoned the bloody remains of their leader and ran. Leaving her alone in the alley with the image of Loki.

The beast kicked again, chains rattling ominously. Jane knew she couldn't afford to give it time to recover. If it did, that would be the end. Heart racing, she reached for more of the rain, letting it rope and cling over over her arm and through her fingers like ropes of nothingness, and threw them at the raging beast inside her. They flew and clung as she cast them, bowing the beast's back, wrapping around its head, buckling its legs.

The beast bucked and bellowed, jerking its head in a sudden arc that pulled at the net of rain she held, its scream jarring Jane down to her bones. She was flung against the fleshy inner wall of her mind, hard, and almost lost her grip on the bouquet of slender links growing in her hand. She dug her fingers into the mass of chains as she bounced off the wall, crying out through clenched teeth as she held on, and pulled with the momentum of her own weight being flung sideways. It was too much for the straining creature to compensate, and the whole of her mind shook as, with a panicked shriek, the beast lost its balance and fell.

It lay there, twisting, kicking against the far wall, throwing its body sideways in a desperate attempt to reach her, its horns slashing at the air inches from her ankles and abdomen. She reached out over the lip of the chasm beyond the tunnel and gathered more rain in her hand. Shouting wordlessly between clenched teeth, she hurled it in the creatures face; blue links, half-formed from the spray, wrapped over the beast's snout, pushing painfully at its eyes, so that it thrashed its head wildly, jangling deafeningly with the chains that now draped it like Christmas tinsel.

Another chain, another roar, another defiant thrust, but with each one, the beast's strength grew less, the chains rustling and hissing in a cacophonous parody of the rain they were formed from, until at last, Jane stood over it, panting, holding a wealth of chains like some great, braided leash. And one final length of chain.

Panting hard she tore her eyes away from her enemy to stare down at the final chain. Blue light that seemed to flow and refract like liquid through the solid metal links. This one felt different. Something told her that if she chose to slip this last fetter around the beast's neck, she could tie it off inside her mind; bind the beast permanently inside her.

She reached out to lay the final shackle in place. Then she hesitated.

Shivering with hot and cold she stared down at the monster, defeated on the floor of its lair. Here lay the enemy that had pursued her through so many nightmares, the creature that screamed in her mind every time she tried to focus or think, or even feel anything other than anger or misery. The sum of all her rage given form, and the power to destroy her, and others. She should hate it. She did hate it. It lay there, panting, glaring. Subdued. Enraged. Ready, if ever the chains slipped, to run her through on its wicked horns and trample her into a bloody paste under the sharp blades of its hooves. A deadly force tied down and dominated by a killing numbness that flowed through her hands and held the creature like any weapon…

Like a weapon. Not a cage. A weapon. She looked into the beasts eyes, and saw pain.

"This is who I am…" she murmured.

She felt a tear fall down her cheek and she blinked.

Why? She'd beaten it, hadn't she? Her head was clearing, the ringing and the pain and the stench of rain dwindling to manageable levels. She should be overjoyed. And she was glad it was under control, that it couldn't hurt her or anyone else like this. She was… but…

But it was part of her.

When she looked down at the beast cowering under the chains, she could see a part of herself – a dark, ugly, dangerous part, but even so - a part of herself tied down, suffering. Enslaved.

"_You are my rain…"_

The rain… the chains…

Both in her mind, and in the alley, Jane stumbled backward, sickened. In the alley, she looked up sharply at the image of Loki.

_This _was what she was to him? A deadening weight of chains holding him back from ripping everything apart?

"That's not love… that's not healing…" she whispered, tears trailing down her cheeks. She gasped, swallowing hard. "God, Loki, that's… awful…"

"You don't know what awful is, Jane," the sending of Loki said quietly, breaking his silence. He smiled apologetically. "I told you. The universe is unkind. You saved me from…" His face fell, and he swallowed and shook his head. "Well... _this_ is bearable. It is peace. Safety. Or as near as I will ever have. You gave it to me – and to all those I might have harmed…"

"I don't _want _to be your _rain_!" Jane cried, appalled. "I don't want to be... _this!_"

"Even so... you were my inspiration. It was for you I sought a way to stop myself. You saved me." He offered her a wry smirk and a hint of a shrug. "It only seemed fair that I should return the favor."

Jane sniffed hard and made herself stop crying, though she didn't dare reach up to wipe the tears away; she had no desire to see the blood she could feel cooling on her face staining her fingertips. She stared hard at Loki, and saw him again in her memory, as she saw him standing in front of her - as she saw in her vision, the beast lying pinned and helpless under the chains - the man who was more than just a faceless monster. The man worthy of salvation that Thor had described to her. The man who had burned worlds to reach her, who had stopped at nothing to protect her, who had puzzled her, and who had understood her. Now the man who thanked her for imprisoning him within his own mind.

Inside, the beast grunted and heaved weakly. Trapped. Straining at its wet, clinging chains. She stood over it, jailing it in its own lair, safe from its rage, and sheltered from the killing rain outside. She tried to understand and failed. Compared to a moment before, it was indeed safe and peaceful… but… it wasn't _peace._ It wasn't _healing._

"This… is what you wanted me to choose?" she asked. For reasons beyond her empirical understanding, she was sure that Loki could see what she saw inside her mind. That he could see the beast in chains. After all, this sending came from inside as well.

"Yes," he said. There was a kind of knowing sadness in his eyes underneath the pride and approval. "You found it, just as I knew you would. The real balance isn't between rage and the numbness, Jane. It is between chaos and control."

"Why…?"

She stopped and shook her head, trying to organize her thoughts. And found, with a spike of elation, that for the first time in a long time, she could. She really, _really _could! She could think! It was almost enough to make her start crying again. _If he believes I gave _this_ back to him, no wonder…_ She had to reign in an overwhelming surge of gratitude that bordered on ecstatic, forcing herself to focus finding answers.

Because despite her joy and relief, she was still missing something. She _had _to be.

"If this was what you wanted me to choose, why leave it to chance?" she tried again. "Why go to all this trouble on a gamble that I would come to the right conclusion? You've clearly got power to influence this... this... _magic,_" she said the word only grudgingly. "And… you've been through this yourself. This is what happened to you when you let that alien inside your head, isn't it?" Loki said nothing, but his silence was confirmation enough. Jane pressed on, latching on to a little seed of indignation growing amongst the fading euphoria. "You understood what was happening! You beat it before! You could have fought it yourself, instead of leaving me to…"

"I showed you the way," he interrupted her, shaking his head. "But it's you the Tesseract wants now, Jane. You are closest to it."

"Closest? That makes no sense. It's on Asgard, I'm on Earth."

"Physical distance means nothing to the Tesseract. It has drawn near you on a..." he pursed his lips thoughtfully, "...on a metaphysical level." At Jane's openly skeptical expression, he smirked and shrugged. "The Tesseract is barely understood. I can offer no better words to describe it. What I can tell you is that it wants you. So it is _your_ choice that it will reflect in its planes and edges. Right now, you alone can bend it to your will."

"My choice?" she murmured. The words stirred something inside her, something she felt certain was important, but that kept slipping through her mental fingers. "My will…"

He nodded. A painful little half smile curving his lips. "I'm sure you heard it again and again. _This is who you are."_

Jane looked up at him sharply, as the words, spoken out loud, seemed to move through her like a kinetic wave, jarring her down to her bones. Their eyes met and a knowing look passed between them. She was the first to break the contact. Her mind, working for the first time in what seemed like forever, whirled feverishly.

"When we are honest we only see the worst in ourselves_…"_ Jane murmured, recalling Thor's words, and it was Loki's turn to cast a sharp glance her way. She ignored it. "The Tesseract reveals you…" she looked back up at him, remembering the self-loathing, fear, guilt and shame that had kept her preoccupied and prevented her from making any significant decisions or any attempt to move forward with her life. "So that's it… that's why…" she said slowly. Despite the disturbing nature of her conclusion, she couldn't help the grim smile that formed on her mouth. "It makes its victims vulnerable by revealing their own ugliness to them… Makes them doubt themselves, hate themselves, weakens their will, then preys upon them in their weakened state..."

"It has no power on its own," Loki confirmed, a pained curve to his mouth in response to her own. "It can only reflect what others show it."

Her eyes narrowed.

"If that's true, why all the cloak and dagger? Why the riddles? Why didn't you just tell me what I had to do?"

_And why won't you tell me what I have to do now…?_

His smile faded slowly and he looked at her for a long moment without speaking.

"You had to find it. To choose it," he answered finally. "Just as I had to choose it. Nothing given by another is as strong as what we achieve for ourselves. It had to be your doing, your choice and your conviction."

He took a deep breath, casting his gaze off to one side, away from hers. The words rang with sincerity, but Jane sensed a hesitation, as though what he said wasn't quite what he meant. As though his words were true, but there was something deeper and more true that he wasn't saying… _Nothing is ever quite what it seems when the Trickster is nearby. _He shook his head and looked back at her, and whatever he might have wanted to say remained unspoken.

"I shaped the magic to give it a form you could manipulate. But only you could find the balance inside yourself," he continued instead. "If I had told you where to look or what to do, you would never have had the strength to do what you must. And you would have been dependent on me to help you maintain your grip on the curse inside you forever."

"Isn't that what you want?" Jane asked him, her indignation souring to bitterness, suddenly ready to be angry with him. "To trap me into an alliance? Keep me under your thumb? Use me for whatever your next scheme might be?"

"No," he said, frowning with every appearance of affront.

Jane ignored him. She was getting angry now, her voice rising slowly with accusation; anger was better than being afraid.

"Maybe you feel some responsibility to help me overcome this, but I'm not dumb enough to believe that's your only angle. Why are you _really _doing all of this, Loki?"

"I want you safe," he said, his voice earnest, but with an edge, as though he were feeling indignation of his own. He looked away, apparently unable to bear her blame and skepticism. "I only want what any man would want for the woman he loves..."

"I told you not to bother with that line about love." Her voice turned dry and she gave him a cool, level look. "Whatever role you've decided to assign me in your fight against the Tesseract, you don't care about me that way, Loki. I'm not stupid. And I've heard enough about your 'goldfly' reputation to know better." Her anger deepened with an embarrassment she didn't quite understand. "I don't know what you're really after, but whatever it is, this _isn't_ the right approach. You could just try _asking_, you know. You don't have to insult my intelligence with those kinds of lies."

Loki said nothing, though she could see his jaw clenching in frustration. He wouldn't look at her. For some reason, that needled her. Her skin prickled with irritation and something she refused to look at too closely, for fear it would turn out to be more disappointment.

"Look," she snapped when his silence persisted, "that kind of empty talk might have let you get what you want out of other women in the past. But _I_ have zero interest in becoming another notch in your bedpost, and I _know _you don't really want _me;_ you just want to manipulate me, and I'm not going to let you. So either level with me, or leave me out of it, because if you think you're going to sweet talk me into…"

Jane didn't know exactly which part of her angry diatribe did it, but it was like stepping on a landmine. Loki exploded forward, and suddenly he was simply _there_, inches away, looming above her, reaching for her, his eyes sparking with a heat that was part anger and part something else entirely.

_I__ promised myself I wouldn't let this happen again… _Jane thought, stunned, a bare instant before his fingers threaded into the hair at the nape of her neck, and his mouth found hers in a crushing kiss.

As with each previous occasion when he'd touched her, Jane felt herself become water, and his touch created ripples that moved through her, leaving no part of her body or mind unmoved. She wondered distantly if it was some kind of psychokinetic ability Loki had. Or if it was just Loki himself. There was no green lightning, despite the pendant still hanging cold and heavy around her neck, because he wasn't really there. He was nothing but a projection, a part of the magic inside her… but the touch felt so real, his hand in her hair, cradling her head, holding her still, and his lips on hers so warm, so _hot,_ when she had been so cold for so long... She felt like a moth circling a flame.

_It's chemical, _she told herself, knowing it for an excuse even as she gave in to it. _Just… chemical… _

She swayed into him, dizzied, letting her hands slide up the strong plane of his chest to steady herself, and heard the breath rush out of him as though she'd body-slammed him instead of brushing against him. His fingers tightened in her hair, sharpening the angle of her head so that he could dominate her mouth, deepening the kiss as his other arm came around her back, pulling her hard against him. Jane felt herself in peril of going weak in the knees, and experienced an inexplicable temptation to slide her hands just a few more inches up to drag the pads of her fingers along the pale skin of his neck. She resisted, though only just. Every little thing she did, every little movement or reaction, seemed to affect him so acutely. What would he do, she wondered, if she touched him? Curiosity thrummed through her, an urge to experiment…

But the way he held her hair was reminiscent enough of that night in Manhattan to break into the fugue of hunger and sensation and need that had so badly distracted her.

_This shouldn't… I shouldn't… _His lips stole her thoughts as they had stolen her voice, hungry, demanding, telling her impatiently without words to stop denying him, stop saying those things, stop speaking, just shut up and… _I can't let him rule me like this. I can't let him think that he can…_

It took far more effort than she was comfortable with, but she braced her hands on his chest and shoved him away. He let her – she didn't have any doubt that, illusion or not, he could have held her against her will if he so chose - and took three deliberate steps back, breathing hard, his eyes still hot with anger and need.

"Do not tell me what I do or do not want. I _know_ what I want. I want _you_, Jane," he insisted in a harsh, hushed tone, frustration and determination rising in his eyes, piercing her, demanding that she accept that truth. He pressed his lips together, his eyes falling closed for a heartbeat, as though helpless to keep from savoring the lingering feel of her lips on his.

"Not for a mere moment. Not for a night…" He swallowed hard, curling and uncurling his fists in an agitated manner, then whirled and paced away from her. His head bowed, though his shoulders remained rigid. Jane wished she could see his face, and was simultaneously glad she couldn't. "And not as a servant. Not as a subject. Not as some timid, servile wench that I can twist into knots and do with what I please. I've had all of that before. There are whorehouses and slave markets aplenty all over the Nine Realms, if that were what I desired."

He turned back to her, his voice hard, his expression unyielding. "I told you already, you are not meant to be ruled. And I don't want to rule you. I want to stand beside you. I want to _be _with you_._"

The declaration hung in the air between them, undeniable.

Jane could only blink at him, bewildered. Her own lips still tingled with the memory of his touch, though she didn't let herself indulge in it as he had, but the recollection of the passion in his kiss compounded the veracity of his words. Whatever else he was after, he meant what he said.

And still it made no sense.

"Why me?" she asked, her voice slightly rough. The shadows and magic still howled around them like a nightmare come to life, yet somehow this was suddenly the most important question she could think of. She cleared her throat quietly and made herself meet and hold his eyes. "You don't even know me… so why…?"

He stared back at her for an instant, as though mesmerized, his eyes softening thoughtfully.

"Can anyone choose who they love?" he replied waspishly. He sighed and looked away. "It is true we know so little about one another. I…" he faltered, embarrassed, Jane would have thought if she didn't know better, "I want to know more… I want to know you... I..." He paused, blowing out a deep breath through pursed lips. "I don't know what I'm doing, Jane," he admitted in a low, thoughtful voice. "I have never felt this way before. _Never._ And for my kind, 'never' is far longer than one so young as you can imagine."

His eyes grew distant, then fell closed, as though searching back through all the ages of his life and finding nothing, and as had happened with Thor, Jane was once again struck by the sheer weight of the years - _centuries_ - that had made the man she was speaking to. When he opened them again and refocused on her, the longing in them stole her breath. She was abruptly reminded of Alexa's words... _Love may drive a man to extreme lengths._ _Who knows how far it might drive a god?_

"What I do know is that it is _you_ that I will always want," he said quietly. "You who are my light in the dark. You whose face and voice live in my mind like my own thoughts. You who challenges me at every turn. You who _never _do what I expect." He glanced up at her. "You, the only woman I have ever met who is like me. Who might be able to understand…"

"Loki," she choked out around the lump forming in her throat, regretting her question even as heat rose in her cheeks. Her skin felt too hot and too tight, and her gut twisted with a knee-jerk regret… "I… I'm with Thor, and I can't… I won't ever..."

Loki winced as though she'd slapped him. His face darkened dangerously. Jane had to force herself not to take a step backwards.

"Thor…" he sneered in a low tone that was more frightening than if he'd shouted it, his fingers tightening into trembling fists. "Thor, who abandoned you, who left you alone without hope, to wait and wonder, Thor who is…" He pressed his lips together in a hard line, as though to physically restrain the words that were trying to burst forth. The effort seemed to deflate him, a measure of his fury easing out of his frame. "He deserves none of your loyalty, Jane. None of it. If you knew…"

Again his pressed his lips together and looked away, his expression smoothing. He unclenched his fists and drew in a deep breath, as though opening himself up to hide the wild outburst of his heart back into its cage.

"It doesn't matter," he said quietly. "What I feel for you will never diminish. It can only grow. But I will _never_ desire your servitude or false affection. If you cannot choose me, then I will not have you." He looked at her again, and there was pain in his eyes, but resignation as well. Whatever other games he might be playing, he meant what he was saying. "When will you hear me? _Everything _depends on you."

Jane had no idea how to respond. Her heart was beating too fast. How did one react to such a statement, to such gestures, from a virtual stranger?

_Thor was a virtual stranger when I first fell for him... _her mind whispered treacherously. _I kissed him when I barely knew him. I spent two years waiting based on three days of whirlwind excitement and a single kiss. Is what Loki is saying any stranger than that…?_

_ Loki did a lot more than kiss me. Loki let an alien hijack his mind and tried to conquer a planet._

_And Loki is not Thor! _

_ …but still…_

Deep inside, she felt the beast squirm in its chains and gasped as the world tilted. The course of the conversation had unsettled her enough to distract her. She'd let her grip slip. She tightened it, frightened out of her confusion.

_Focus, idiot. Sort out the love life later! _

"Okay… for now, let's say your motives were pure," she said, waving her hands in a decisive and dismissive gesture, pushing aside the embarrassing honesty of his words and focusing on the relevant portion of what he'd said to lead her down this tangent. "You gave me what I need to tie down the Tesseract's intrusion. And I've done it. So… what's next?"

Loki's jaw clenched, and he backed further away, as though putting physical distance between them could give him some mental and emotional objectivity.

"That," Loki said unhelpfully, allowing the subject to drop, though his eyes remained intense, "is entirely up to you."

"What does that _mean,_ Loki?" she asked, exasperated. Inside her mind, the beast twitched fitfully, and she yanked hard on the chains of rain to quiet it. Then winced at her own cruelty. "What am I supposed to do with this thing?"

"Make the choice," Loki said. His face had become a passive mask once more, hiding his thoughts. But she could swear he could see into her mind, and was staring intently at the chain she held in her hand. The final chain that would lock the beast forever in captivity. "Bind it."

"Bind it… and what?" Jane asked, the first icy tendrils of cold dread slithering up out of the pit of her stomach at the finality in his voice. "What… for it to sit like a rock inside me for the rest of my life?"

"Or to use as you see fit," he suggested, offering her a shadow of a sly smile. "You saw how effective it can be when unleashed..." When she said nothing, only stared at him in disbelief, he let it fall away. "This is… the only way to keep the blue flame at bay," he replied slowly, with something worryingly like regret.

"You can't be serious..."

"Every day will be a struggle," he pressed on. "But you will be free."

This was… it? Jane shook her head. She couldn't believe it. This was where the trail of clues was meant to lead? To this… this standoff between herself and these two opposing forces inside?

"This isn't freedom," she insisted. This couldn't be the solution. She refused to believe… "I don't… I don't want this… I don't…" She blinked rapidly, fighting not to cry again; she refused with ever fiber of her being to allow herself to be that weak. Not now.

"I've…" Loki looked away as she battled back the tears. "I've searched for another answer. Something… anything…" He caught her eye again and held it, his face an unreadable mask. "This is as close to freedom as either of us will ever be."

"It can't…"

Loki's posture didn't change, exactly, but he seemed to draw into himself, as though her quiet despair were more devastating than if she were screaming at him. He cast a bitter, resigned look her in her direction. As though there were a million miles between them, and with his words he was shoving her farther and farther away.

"You should never have had to endure this. I am… so sorry."

A coldness invaded Jane to the core. She barely knew Loki, true, but from what she did know, she had a feeling he wasn't the sort that apologized. The fact that he had… Her hand shook, reaching up to finger the fiery mark on her forehead once again as her eyes slid closed.

This couldn't be the answer; it couldn't be the end… but what if it was?

Inside, the beast huffed painfully, jerking and heaving as though it were in agony under the weight of the rain, but too exhausted to do more than suck in shallow, panting breaths. But its eyes were full of fury, dull and glassy as they had become, and she knew that if the chains were lifted, it would waste not an instant before it ran at her, ripped her open, trampled her flesh and painted its horns with her blood.

Even so… that was her, lying there in pain. It was better than letting the monster consume her, and far better than subjecting herself to the rain. But it would be with her all her life – a festering wound inside her that would never heal…

Her eyelids fluttered open once more to meet Loki's eyes with a kind of begging wretchedness. She was taken aback to see his eyes reflected her misery as he watched her realize that she was trapped; they were almost equally wretched before he looked away.

There was an instant temptation to get angry, to make him her scapegoat, let him take the blame and rail against him, was powerful. It was always so much easier to have someone to punish. So much less frightening than accepting. But irrationally, unbelievably, something in her chest constricted with sudden empathy. He'd faced this too; but he'd had no one to help him or guide him. Despite the… questionable nature of his methods, he'd tried to help her, hadn't he?

"You didn't do this to me," she breathed dejectedly; her voice wouldn't rise above a whisper. "The Tesseract did it. It tried to take me over, and you stopped it. You didn't cause this…"

It wasn't meant to be comfort, or any kind of absolution. It was barely compassion. She was speaking more to herself than to him, trying to come to grips with it. It was a statement of fact. Loki seemed to take it like it was condemnation.

"Yes I did," he hissed, his eyes flashing as he took a hasty step towards her before arresting his advance and mastering his temper. "It was my weakness, my _failure_. The Tesseract knew you through knowing me. It only reached you through me, through my vulnerability. My pathetic need to touch you..." He huffed out a disgusted little sigh. "I told you, there was never any good in taking what you weren't aware I had stolen. I learned that the hard way, Jane. You must not even remember it. But… in that moment of confusion on the Dark World, when the Aether was burning… we were so close, you were in my arms… and I gave in to temptation, just for an instant and pressed a kiss to your brow." His jaw clenched hard, as though he was forcing the confession past his lips with all his might. "The weakness weakened my control… and… the Tesseract…"

Jane's eyes widened. She was willing to bet anything the location of the mark was the exact same spot his lips had touched.

"Do not spare the whip, Jane. I failed you." Something like crushing shame broke over his features for an instant, but they hardened swiftly. "I was always going to fail you," he murmured, almost to himself, casting suddenly glassy eyes down to stare at his left hand like he hated it. "I was always going to fall short…"

"Why?" Jane asked, her mind working as she watched him. A thought occurred to her, and her eyes narrowed with another rush of righteous anger. "Because you're a Frost Giant?" She sucked in a deep, angry breath, unaccountably annoyed. "That must make a convenient excuse," she continued, shaking her head slowly and taking an angry step towards him, seething with resentment. "No mistake or misdeed would ever really be your fault, or your responsibility to correct, because you have your blood to blame it on. You could rationalize anything." Her jaw clenched as she tried to reign in her temper. "Even wrapping your hand around the throat of someone you claim to love and squeezing until they lose consciousness..."

Loki's eyes had jerked up at the phrase 'frost giant', and as she continued, his whole frame stiffened, as though he were in pain – as though she'd stabbed him in the chest, and he was trying to bear up under the agony as she slowly twisted the blade. His eyes were like chips of green ice by the time she'd finished, and he tilted his chin up as met her unyielding gaze.

"My carelessness pushed you into the spider's web," he said after an interminable pause during which the words hung in the lengthening silence between them like a pall. His voice was slightly hoarse, cold and forbidding as the dead of winter, but a pale shade of defiant vindication projected in the set of his jaw and the piercing shine of his eyes. "But then I gave you the means to protect yourself."

Jane stared him down, equally defiant, but in the end she was the first to look away. She bit her lip, hard, searching for some other avenue, some new trick he might be playing, and finding none. He really meant it. This was the answer he'd been teasing her into seeking. The way out. The answer to _uruz: _To live forever with a violent, shrieking rage monster bound up with anesthetic chains inside her mind. To live with fear, always fighting her anger.

She couldn't seem to stop shaking.

The old crone's warning and her pale, haunted eyes rose in her memory.

"_You are cursed…" _

Jane backed up, shivering, until she could feel the brick of the alley against her back, and stared at Loki with a sense of hopelessness. The black wind buffeted her, drawing her hair across her face, and she swiped at it struggling to see him through the flickering blue light in this inexplicable darkness…

She blinked several times, her brow tightening with a sudden curious thought.

If she'd solved the puzzle and subdued the Tesseract's influence… why hadn't the light returned? Why was she still caught up in this whirlwind of energy? Why was the magic still raging around her? Was it just because she hadn't secured the final binding on the beast yet?

Or…

Her eyes narrowed as realization struck. The last time the sending of Loki had appeared…

"Why are you here?" she demanded abruptly, though an idea of the answer was already coalescing inside her head.

The sending of Loki shrugged.

"I told you before," he said evenly, his eyes locking with hers. "If you can see me, it is because someone is trying to unwork my magic."

.

* * *

_In the depths of the mortal's mind, seven green stars swarmed, struggling against lashing strands of blue magic whipping violently from the furiously rocking figure of a balance scale. The scale stood before the silvery wall of water that defended the power in the deep. As each frond of magic shot out to penetrate the mirror, one of the stars would soar in and block it, dashing it aside, teasing the frond of blue fire into chasing it. _

_The battle had been raging for a relative eternity, and the green lights grew dimmer with each pass. Fading. This was not a fight they could win. But the seven stars weren't fighting for themselves, or even for victory. They had known it going in, and despite the lies they'd told the ones waiting at home: none of them really expected to survive it. _

_They were not fighting for their lives. They were fighting for the future. And playing for time. _

_ Abruptly, the blue fire drew in. The figure of the balance scale seemed to bulge from the fulcrom, bowing the crossbar as it surged and pulsed like an inflamed pustule. The stars aligned themselves in a defensive formation as the knotted mass of blue fire erupted in long licking tongues of blue fire, and a massive wave of blue strands out sang from the center of the balance scale in numbers too numerous to counter. The stars __gleamed brighter with inner light as they braced for what could only be the fall of the final blow..._  


_ Without warning, the heart of the blue fire burst like an egg crushed in a careless fist, hemorrhaging blue fire in pulsing spurts like the gushing of arterial blood from a mortal wound. The wave of blue strands faltered, shaking and writhing as though in agony as they squirmed and tangled and fell into disarray just short of their target. From the shattered core of the fire, green rays radiated like shining swords, and an eighth star, bigger and brighter than the rest, shot through the blue fire, burning a trail like a comet through the deep. It knocked the streamers of blue fire asunder, and the strands flailed in frustration and pain, their attack failed and their energy spent. _

_The eighth star took its place amongst the rest. The seven circled the eighth in fascinated joy, basking in the magnitude of its brilliance and seeming to draw strength from its fire. _

_The cracked figure of the blue balance scale shuddered and convulsed. Several more strands, thicker and blunted, wriggled through the devastating wound left by the eighth star's attack, pushing it apart to the wet crackling pops of breaking ligaments. Not strands - legs. Slowly, as though being birthed from the inferno some abyssal womb, the hideous mandibles and numberless beady black eyes of of a massive blue spider strained through the opening, struggling to squeeze through the fissure. It had waited long enough. It had learned to covet, and it coveted now. It had struggled too hard to allow these firefly creatures to thwart its desires. It would emerge within the mortal's mind, tear the wall of water asunder, and build a new web upon this seat of power so deep within the mortal that she didn't even know it was there. _

_If she would not choose a form for it to take, it would devour her and take_ her _form. It would not be left behind! Never, ever again!_

_The eight green stars refused to allow it. They swirled outward in a shimmering green spiral, all eight in unison, to station themselves in a ring around the mirror formed by the wall of water, which reflected the horrific spectacle of the spider's thorax sliding through the jagged crack to dangle ponderously, scrabbling for purchase along the scale's sheer side. __Slowly but with gaining speed they began to circle it, spinning with ever increasing velocity until the water began to churn and flow with their movement. Soon the water had formed a whirlpool in the depths, obscuring the sight of the scale's fissure straining to stretch around the emergence of the spider's bulbous abdomen. Faster, deeper, around and around, the eight glowing green stars sped, ignoring the nightmare of fangs oozing with venom and wickedly clattering legs emerging before them. With a final heave, the monster burst forth from the wreck of the scale, raising itself on long, jointed legs like a hairy scaffolding, blue fire racing infernally along its exoskeleton as it hissed in triumph - just as the stars jerked abruptly to a jarring halt. _

_The force of the water's movement colliding with the stars' inertia caused a violent retrograde counter motion in the flow; wrenching the water in two opposite directions, and forcing it in the only direction left for its kinetic energy to escape: up.  
_

_ Like a boiling geyser, the water erupted. The spider screamed in the deep as the flood struck it like a steamroller, drowning the blue fire in a raging torrent as it sped towards the surface of the mortal's mind._

_._

* * *

Jane's eyes widened as a gasp tore between her lips. The world flashed green and blue like a strobe for a painful instant, and she had to shake her head to clear it. Her mouth fell open, questions crowding on the tip of her tongue, but her words fled as Alexa's mark flared painfully against her skin.

_Laguz, _the waters with hidden depths, that mirrored unseen truths. The mark of the magician that had tried once before to undo Loki's spell – the only other time his sending had appeared.

Loki's eyes narrowed on it.

"I _told_ that insipid mortal not to interfere… poking and prodding and whispering in your mind, trying to distract you from your choice…" A derisive smirk pulled at his lips. "Yet too weak by far to undermine me. Or to weaken you. Yet still she continues to try…" His face fell, a dark look sharpening his features. "If you had lost the mark before you found the right choice… if the Tesseract were free to have its way unchallenged… " His jaw clenched tight, and she could see machinations bubbling behind them as he stared malevolently at the green mark. "I should flay the flesh from her bones inch by inch for…"

"You won't touch her!" Jane bit out. For some reason, the high, sweet voice of the little girl, Kelda, echoed in Jane's mind, and her own voice gained a vein of pure steel. "You won't lay a finger on her, or I will never… ah!"

Loki's eyes snapped up to watch her face, glinting with challenge and caution, observing her closely as pain spiked through her head. Inside, she felt the rain shift with an ominous rumble, and the beast stir fitfully with something like fear. Something was coming.

She sucked in a deep breath, tightening her grip on the chains. The temptation to loop the final chain around its neck and contain it - cement her into a constant struggle against the darkness inside forever – was nearly overwhelming. Even so, she resisted. To chain up that beast would be to chain up herself, and the moment she did it, she would never be free of her battle against this monster, fighting horn and hoof, struggling day and night to loose itself and overwhelm her.

Just as it had done to Loki. Just as it was doing to him even now.

_This can't be all there is… I can't believe this is all there is… I don't _want _this to be all there is!_

_Laguz _burned, breaking into her hopeless, fearful thoughts with the words out of her memories.

_"There is more than one way up the mountain," _Alexa's voice whispered.

_ Choose, _the Tesseract's wordless command vibrated through her bones.

Jane looked back down at her arm. _Laguz _was a deep, lightless abyss, a bottomless sea, guarding its secrets. But Alexa had done this… she had marked Jane with her magic, even though a man she worshiped as a god had threatened to destroy her if she did. That was not something anyone did lightly.

So why?

"_Baldur was far-seeing"_

It meant something. Something more than she was seeing._ Think, _she ordered herself.

_ "All my intention was to give you this choice..."_ the memory of Alexa whispered through the storm, both inside and out._ "He may be more… And so might you…"_

She stared at the green mark. It was coming; something rising from deep inside her… She refocused on the vision of the tunnel in her mind just in time to discover what it was.

Water.

A surging, silvery wall of water, swelling up from the depths of the pit, from the very bottom of the hole that had been bored into her mind by the Tesseract's magic.

_"…decide for yourself..."_

The water rushed towards her, thundering and echoing like a waterfall inside a cave. In its current, flickering green lights bobbed and darted, though whether they were drawing the water on, or being swept up by it, she couldn't tell. Jane sucked in a breath, tensing with alarm and bracing herself as the deluge raced towards her.

A heavy gasp gusted out of her a moment later as, to her surprise, the wave crashed abruptly to a halt just beyond the struggling beast, as though it had run up against some invisible wall. It pooled and rose, seething and choppy as the surface of the sea to form a silvery liquid barrier swirling with the black of depth she could not even begin to imagine. Deep enough to fill an ocean.

The green lights – eight of them, she counted – swarmed against the invisible barrier, bobbing on the calming current of the waters, and formed themselves into a shape. The shape of Alexa's mark, _laguz. _The lights, small and bright as stars against the night black deep, held the shape for a timeless instant, flaring brightly. Then, one by one, they let go, sank back into the flood and faded, as though exhausted, the last of their strength spent...

As the last vanished, the sea stilled inside her. and became a mirror. Jane peered into it, transfixed. She gasped at what she saw there.

Just as the rune _laguz _promised, the mirror showed her to herself.

All this time she had, on some level, felt herself to be a pawn in someone else's game. SHIELD. Loki. Malekith. Thor. Alexa. The Tesseract. She'd felt it so often that she only now realized she'd come to believe it.

But the mirror didn't show her a pawn.

It showed her a white queen.

"_You are not meant to be ruled."_

"_The trick is to be honest while seeking the best…"_

"_There is more than one way up the mountain."_

_Choose._

A pawn could only move forward or diagonally, it was a choice between the two… but a queen…

"I… can move in any direction…" she whispered.

"_…it's you the Tesseract wants… it is your choice that it will reflect in its planes and edges_…_you alone can bend it to your will..._"

_Choose._

Jane looked up at Loki, standing alone in the dark of the alley, proud and sad and resigned and hopeful. But above all, certain. Certain that he was right, that this was right, that this was the only way, the best way...

Something sparked inside her, stealing her breath for a beat of her heart.

He was certain. But he was _wrong._

Her eyes dropped to search the ground and found his gift lying in the dirt across the alley. The Asgardian medicine, in the beautiful golden jar. The rune _sowulo _so prominent on it surface.

"My choice."

That deep place inside her sparked again, and she knew the feeling for what it was: Hope. She'd held the answer in her hands all along. He'd given it to her. And he didn't even know it.

Jane raised her head, and their eyes met once more. She saw the triumph and resignation in them falter at whatever he saw in her face.

_My choice._

Then she saw fear.

"What are you doing?" he demanded, his voice urgent.

He took a step towards her, and the unnatural winds howling around them in the unnatural lightlessness picked up. The image of him flickered for an instant, and he stumbled, the colors of his hair and clothing running, as though he were a painting and a great brush had swooped down and smeared him.

"Stop," he ordered her, gasping as though the wind had been knocked out of him, his breathlessness giving it the sound of a plea. "Jane, whatever you're doing, _stop._"

"No," she said, meeting his eyes as a warmth like sunlight welled up within her. The light of another choice. _Her _choice. "You want me to choose between chaos and control..."

"Yes!" Loki interrupted, suddenly desperate and clearly frustrated. He sucked in a deep breath, marshaling his self-control. Despite his struggle against the wind, he managed to gather a passable facsimile of calm, only to raise an annoyed eyebrow at her, a smirk playing on his lips.

"Is it truly such a difficult choice?" he asked her reasonably. "Banish the mortal magician. Bind the beast and control it. Make the choice_._"

Something wild, defiant and bright stirred in Jane's chest and rose to sparkle in her eyes, and she stared at him, wide eyed with dawning amazement. She absolutely couldn't resist the mischievious little half smile that quirked the corner of her mouth. The tables had turned - she knew something he didn't know. She shook her head slowly.

"No."

Loki's eyes narrowed. She thought she saw a bright edge of hurt in them, gilding the irritation on his face.

"Truly?" he sneered. "You would give yourself over to destruction, and allow yourself to become a tool to destroy others, just to spite me?" he shook his head, and cast a pointed look down at the dead man, going cold and rigid in a black pool of blood before capturing her gaze once more. "Is _that_ what you want to do? To become? No… no, you may hate me, my Jane, but that isn't in you. If you desire to heal this wound, you don't have any choice."

Jane cocked her own eyebrow at him, any guilt she felt at his fear and distress evaporating in the blink of an eye. She was getting heartily sick of that phrase.

"There is always a choice," she countered. "I don't have to choose one or the other. And I don't have to choose both."

"What are you…?"

"I can choose neither."

Loki blinked, his face smoothing with surprise.

"What?"

Despite the blood and fire and fear that swarmed all around her, Jane very nearly laughed at the unaffected confusion in his voice. Instead she met his eyes with ferocious challenge, her gaze shining with the dazzling green reflection of _laguz_.

"There is more than one way up the mountain," she told him, wondering if she sounded as obnoxiously cryptic as Alexa Solberg, and not caring in the slightest.

Green light glinted at her from across the alley. Glancing down again, her eyes found the golden disc. The green glimmer of _laguz _beamed from its edges, battling the shine of the blue flame of _uruz _on her brow. But at the center, _sowulo_, sparkled gold and green unchallenged by blue, reminding her mysteriously of sunlight dancing down through the leaves of the trees, as it had on the day she'd spent with Thor in the park.

The healing sun.

This was what he had promised. This was what she wanted. It was the reason she had lied. The reason she had waited. The reason she had suffered. The reason she had endured it all: For a chance to heal.

This stalemate wasn't healing. Loki's choice wouldn't give that to her. Maybe for him, who claimed to have seen such suffering, _uruz _seemed like healing. Maybe it was more than he ever thought he would have. Maybe that was why he could live with it.

Jane couldn't. And she wouldn't.

_It's just like he said_, she thought, though it was clear he didn't know the half of it, _I had to figure it out for myself.  
_She didn't know how one man could be so right and so wrong at the same time. _All conflicting truths_, Thor had called him. _There was no one like him in all the realms. _Maybe there was more of the old Loki in him than she'd thought possible.

Gingerly, she pushed off the wall and walked carefully around the bloody ruin of the man she had destroyed. The wind didn't touch her now, though it moved with her, cut deep whorls in the ground as she moved across to where the disc lay in the dirt. She bent and picked it up, running a thumb over the polished golden surface as she rose, wiping away the grime and filth to fully exposing the golden rune.

In her hands, she held the sun. And inside, she felt it.

In the vision of the tunnel inside her mind, the rain still stung at her back, but a sudden burst of tingling heat washed across her skin, so that the rain sizzled and evaporated from her flesh. She turned in the tunnel and peered out into the abyss beyond, a smile growing on her face.

"You said it yourself, Loki," she told the sending still struggling against the tempest in the alley. "The Tesseract's magic will reflect me. My choice… my will…"

The sky was growing lighter. Here and there, shafts of golden light began to pierce the storm, reflecting and refracting from the wall of water to fill the dark lair of the beast with brilliant sunlight. The beast bellowed and heaved against the intrusion. The clouds thinned and the rain faltered, fleeing before the coming of the sun.

"No!" Loki cursed, struggling towards her, but to no avail. "You don't understand, Jane!" shouted, over the screaming gale. It had picked up to near the speed of a tornado, as though the storm, forced from her vision, was seeking expression in the physical world instead. She stood in the eye of it, untouched, as the sun rose inside her mind, while he battled the wind. "The Tesseract with reflect _you! _You can't… you can't run from yourself! I tried, gods know I did! It nearly destroyed me, along with countless others!" He tried to take another step forward, leaning into the wind, reaching for her. "Please Jane... You have to face yourself. This…" his voice faltered. He lowered his eyes, and Jane thought she saw an edge of shame in them. "This… is who you are…"

"You're the one who doesn't get it, Loki," she said to him, unsure where her certainty in her voice came from, but absolutely certain that she was right for the first time in longer than she could remember. In her vision, she glanced down at the beast, studying it closely. "Yes, _this is who I am_. There is ugliness inside me." She shook her head. "Everybody has beauty and ugliness inside. But… that's not what matters." She looked away from the beast, and focused on Loki. "You're the one who made me see it. Don't you understand?"

She took a step towards him, and he was blown back by the violence of the storm, but he looked up at her, and their eyes locked.

"What makes us who we are," she told him, "is our choices."

.

* * *

_In the depths the mortal's mind, at the bottom of the night-black sea, the blue spider struggled in its unsuitable form to swim deeper, straining with covetous intent. _

_The hidden treasure, the sleeping power, so close, so close. _

_The power to take a form, and make it last forever. _

_The power at last to have its own power... _

_A pulse rocked the waters, and the spider flailed, spinning anchorless in the void. From the depths of the hidden vault echoed a long-lost song, and as the echoes bounced up the walls of the deep well, they sparked and sparkled and shone with their own brilliance. Spears of light, a golden green like leaves kissed by sunlight, shafted through the lightlessness of the ocean floor and the spider's shroud of shadows. It recoiled, shrilling soundlessly in agony, as it beheld the prize rising out of the darkness. _

_Thrust away back up towards the surface by the force of its emergence, the blue spider learned a new lesson. As it groped fruitlessly towards the radiant beauty of the life force it could never hope to reach, locked in awe and sorrow, it learned how to weep.  
_

.

* * *

Loki stared at her, eyes wide and forbidding, as her words sank into him, piercing and painful as arrows. For an instant, the howling wind banked and seemed to still, and something ineffable moved between them, a slender ray of epiphany cutting across the distance and the confusion and the secrets and the distrust to connect them in a brief moment of understanding.

Before her eyes, his expression changed, until he looked as stricken as she had when she believed his way had been the only way. His lips parted, as though he wanted to speak, but no words would come. Her lips tingled as she remembered their touch, not from a moment ago, but from that night in Manhattan, with the reverent whisper echoing in her ears – _you are my rain –_ and for once, the memory and fear of his hand at her throat didn't roll in like a storm cloud to overshadow it. Right now, he was the one who was afraid.

The connection must have moved both ways, because for some reason Jane felt tears prick her eyes again; but this time, it wasn't sorrow or fear. She cocked her head and smiled sadly at him as the wind picked up once more, fiercer than ever, ripping at the image of him, smearing him sideways, the whirlwind swirling with the green of his clothes, the green of his eyes. Even so, she thought she could make out the pain her smile caused him; he gasped to see it directed at him, as though she'd given a final twist to the blade she stuck in his chest.

"Thank you for trying, Loki…"

"Jane…"

"…but you don't get to tell me what my choices are anymore," she said, her voice still and sure from the eye of the storm. "I choose who I am."

Inside her mind, she watched the chains of rain that held the beast evaporate. It shook them off kicking wildly, and regained its legs. She forced herself to peer directly into its rolling, hateful gaze. Facing herself. Its rage rumbled deep in its throat as it scuffed its hooves, digging violent gouges into the floor of the tunnel, its sides heaving like a bellows as it panted with fury.

The warmth of the sun was a solid weight at her back.

It charged. Jane didn't run. She didn't try to dodge. Holding tight to the golden sun in the alley, she stretched her hands out in the vision and faced the monster inside her with open arms, embracing it as it ran her down.

It took her right in the middle of her body, and as she had stood on the edge of the precipice, both Jane and the beast were flung free of the dark hole in her mind, out into the endless chasm beyond, out into the failing rain, out into the bright new day inside her, and were swallowed into the all consuming brilliance of the sunrise.

Just before the sunlight blinded her, she caught a glimpse down into the hole over the back of the beast, of a rocking balance scale shattering into a million shards, and beyond, flailing in the wall of water, a hideously massive blue spider, its legs writhing and thrashing, its mandibles clacking wildly, its beady eyes hungry, covetous and enraged, thwarted as it watched its prey slip its bonds…

Jane gasped, panicked for an instant, then lost sight of it as she began to fall. The last chain - her last chance to bind the beast, and trade her soul for the power of the aurochs - flew free of her fingers. She let it go. Time slowed to a crawl and she watched it fall away above her, a slithering silhouette against the white light of the heavens. It hung their for an instant, weightless, light lancing through its links. Then, like brittle ice, it shattered into a million glittering splinters.

In the alley, she threw her head back, a cry of release tearing its way out of her throat. Gazing up through the funnel of the whirlwind, she peered into the midnight sky at midday. The stars twinkled mysteriously at her, and she felt the rush of the calm they always brought swelling through her as the sun rose in her eyes.

"_Uruz _is fear…" she whispered.

"Jane!"

Through the unnatural darkness, she saw the sun with her naked eyes. Fascinated, she stared directly into it, knowing she would never get this chance again… and made her choice.

"I'm not afraid."

There was a blinding flash of blue. Jane cried out again, this time in pain, as her skin split. Blue fire erupted from her forehead like a fountain, and kept going, streaming up into the sky like a comet. The wind rushed after it, trailing blood and death and the pall of darkness in its wake. And one last, breathless whisper.

"_Jane_…"

The tail of the blue fire disappeared, and the blue of the sky rushed back in, the light of the sun flowing out to hide the stars from her once more.

.

* * *

_In the second-story living space in the ruin of Manhattan, Jana Solberg lay beside her mother, pale and still. Cold as death. A long, silent heartbeat passed. Then another. And another._

_The girl gasped and jerked awake, sucking air greedily into her lungs as though she'd been drowning under an ocean tide. As on some level, she had. _

_Her hand ached mercilessly, and when she tried to flex it, it pulled and stung as the crust of dried blood on the cut broke, spilling a sprinkling of fresh crimson. Her eyes fluttered open and she was staring up into the drawn face and knowing eyes of her Aunt Alexa. Beside her, her mother stirred, and the others began to wake as well, her Uncle Leif lumbering up to check her great grandmother with a deep furrow in the single, thick brow across his face, the rest shivering and curling in on themselves in pain and exhaustion. _

_It would take time to recover. But they would live. They would live… _

_Jana blinked against the sudden sting in her eyes and bolted upright, falling into her aunt's open arms before bursting into tears. _

_Alexa Solberg closed her eyes and smoothed a comforting hand over her niece's hair._

"_Well done, child," she said softly. "Well done."_

"_Is it…" Jana sniffed. "Is it over?"_

"_No," Alexa replied. "But we have done our part. The rest is up to her."_

_._

* * *

The pressure in Jane's head was gone. There was no ringing in her ears. There was no phantom scent of rain.

Jane took in a deep, slow breath, and it felt like the first breath she'd taken in weeks. She felt empty, but not in a dead way; rather, in a clean way. For the first time in a long time her mind was quiet, and her thoughts came in clear. She took a cautious step, and discovered her legs wouldn't hold her any longer. She sank to her knees, lowering her eyes from the blinding glare in the sky to take in her surroundings.

Loki was gone. So, somehow, was the body of her attacker; Jane could only suppose it had been torn apart and carried it away by the whirlwind. There were a few loose bricks lying around, and the dumpster at the far end of the alley stood askew, but the only appreciable evidence of all that had transpired was a dark smear soaking rapidly into the gravel, and the deep circles that the storm had cut into the dirt and pavement. And the blood dripping from Jane's face to stain her shirt.

She swallowed against the taste of bile at the thought of the man; his sadism; his terror; his mutilated corpse. But she categorically refused to feel guilt over it; she was through with feeling guilty for things beyond her control. _Manhattan was_ not_ my fault, and neither was this._

The magic of the Tesseract was gone, too. It was disturbing to realize, now that it was absent, just how much space it had been taking up inside her head, and without her ever realizing it. She still didn't quite understand the mechanics of how she had banished it. Maybe she never would, now that she had rejected both the magic's influence and Loki's plan. All she was certain of was that it had been her choice.

A choice that she never would have realized she had without the help of Alexa's mark. She glanced down at her arm, and was mildly surprised to see the mark, _laguz, _burned into her arm. Not glowing or glittering green. It was angry red and swollen, like a brand. The magic appeared to have burned itself out.

Pursing her lips, Jane glanced down at the golden disc in her hand. The golden sun winked at her in the true sunlight, and she closed her eyes as they burned again with tears. She let them fall unchecked to wash clean trails through the blood drying on her face, but she didn't cry. Instead, she turned carefully to sit cross-legged against the brick wall, unscrewed the jar, and dabbed a tiny smear of medicine over the burn. Scientific integrity aside, she was finding it very hard to care that it was some unknown alien compound that bent the laws of nature. All she cared about was that it would ease a measure of her pain.

The ointment worked on her skin as always. _Laguz _sizzled, bubbled, and vanished without a trace. Gone from her skin, but it lingered in her mind. It seemed ungrateful to wonder, but she couldn't help it, and now that she could think clearly, she wondered more than ever: why had it been there in the first place? Alexa was an enigma, but it strained credulity to think that she would defy a god to help an almost perfect stranger. No, the more Jane mused over it, the more convinced she became that she would never have risked Loki's wrath without a _real _reason. A personal one, something she stood to gain. What that reason might be, however, continued to elude her.

She sighed as she replaced the lid of the jar, tracing the runes with her eyes, letting them distract her from conjecture that was ultimately pointless without more information. The gold gleamed, bright and beautiful as ever, the faceted shapes and delicate filigree catching the light in an enchanting sparkle.

Loki's gift.

He'd been so wrong about so many things. But even so, his gift had saved her; just not in the way he had expected. She pressed her lips together, examining her thoughts, recalling all she had learned.

Remembering the night of the storm - always the terrifying strength of his hand, the soft, enticing firmness of his lips - the terror, the wonder and the mystery.

Remembering the news reports, the survivor accounts, the tears and fire he'd left in his wake.

Remembering Thor's story of his beloved brother, the riddle of contradictions, the reserved, mischievous playboy who loved his mother and idolized his father, the Frost Giant with a grudging streak of kindness.

Remembering the burnt out skyline of Manhattan, dark windows watching her like the hollow sockets of dead skulls - accusing her, she now realized, not of causing the destruction, but of forgiving it.

Remembering the flash of his eyes, the set of his jaw, the haunted horror in his eyes when he hinted at what he'd faced after falling from Asgard, the adoring, determined expression he showed her as when he told her he loved her and demanded that she believe it.

Remembering the fury and fear on his face as she defied his plan, and the expression of pain and shame when he understood why...

And the look of disbelieving wonder in his eyes as he'd vanished with her name on his lips.

Each piece she of the puzzle she had collected while the Tesseract played havoc inside her head she now began to assemble, fitting them together to see what picture they would show her. And when she was done, and discovered that she'd assembled nothing but the outer borders, she couldn't help the foolish little twist of regret that she might never have the chance to fill in the rest of the picture.

He wasn't a friend. But he wasn't an enemy either. She knew she should still fear him. And she did. But despite the fact that she had no idea what his other motives might be - or if she would ever see him again now that the magic was gone - she was certain, down to her very bones, that Loki was on her side.

Whether that was a good, safe, sane thing remained to be seen.

Even so, she pressed the disc to her lips for an instant, closing her eyes.

"Thank you," she whispered.

.

* * *

_A concussive blast rocked the throne room, blue flame flaring from the high windows. Moments later, the bar on the door cracked and the doors burst open, guards rushing in, their gold helms and spears flashing. They discovered the king slumped over on his throne, broad shoulders heaving as he struggled to catch his breath, clutching his face in his hands. Blood seeped from between his gnarled fingers._

"_My king! What…!"_

"_All is well," the king interrupted brusquely._

"_My king?"_

"_Leave me." When the warriors hesitated, one of the king's hands shot out, snatching up Gungnir and bringing it down hard on the dais, sending an ear-shattering BOOM reverberating through the room. "Leave me!"_

_The guard bowed hastily and retreated, closing the doors behind them, leaving the king alone upon his golden throne. The king lowered his hand from his face. Blood dripped from his forehead, though no wound was visible to the naked eye._

"_Impossible…" he whispered. _

_It was gone. _

Gone.

_For a panicked instant, a horrible thought gripped him, and he cast his gaze directly downward, through marble and gold and steel and the unnatural, light killing dark, to the heart of the weapons vault. But no, the blue spider writhed there still on its marble pillar. The shadows around it seemed to seethe and scream, enraged with hunger and loss, but impotent._

_And even so: it was gone._

_The king all but vaulted off of his golden throne, rushing with a running stride that was very nearly undignified towards a small wooden door set in the shadow of one of the massive pillars behind the throne. The room beyond was used for storage, little more than a large closet, but it was private. The king barred the door with magic anyway._

_With a thought and a flare of green light, the king's illusion fell…_

_Loki stood, panting in the dimness of the store room, pressing the heel of his hand against his pounding heart. Fear and wonder chased through his veins._

_The Tesseract was still there. Still watching, waiting, hungering. But even so, even so, even so…_

_There was no blue flame flickering at the edge of his thoughts. _

_There was no struggle, no chains, no battle against his own darkness, no flare of blue light seeking his to seep through the chinks in his defenses. _

_All was still, quiet, calm. _

_For the first time in years, he was alone inside his own mind._

_Twin tears welled in his wide emerald eyes and spilled sparkling down his pale cheeks unchecked. He sucked in a deep, shuddering breath, and it felt like the first breath he'd taken in years._

_It was impossible… but… somehow…_

"_Jane…"_

_He was free._

_._

* * *

**TBC...**

**.**

* * *

**A/N:** Loki said it himself, Jane never does what he expects - and yet no matter how often she turns the tables, he always seems surprised. When will he learn? Hopefully not yet, that would be boring! ;)

I hope this chapter was not too much of a let down, what with Jane giving up potential superpowers, but I felt like that was the choice she had to make. Jane isn't one to settle for compromise - it's what makes her fit to be Loki's equal in his own estimation (again, when will he learn?). In the end, she had to be true to herself and reach for her own happy ending - and unknowingly give Loki a much happier ending than he ever thought possible.

So Jane has changed the rules again. Now the question becomes: what will Loki do about it?


	9. Chapter 9

**Disclaimer**: The characters and original story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe do not belong to me; this story is not for sale or profit.

**A/N: **Winding down to the end of Part II – and working on the first draft of Part III, which is the section I've been looking forward to for various reasons… this chapter was written to the tune of _Eurydice _by Sleepthief, gorgeous song, check it out!

So much love to all of my reviewers, the value of your feedback is immeasurable. The muse is currently baking chocolate chip tequila cookies, and promises to send one to each of you via a gravitational anomaly in the space-time continuum during the next Convergence… so… they might be slightly stale by the time the get there. Never you mind!

Without further ado…

_**.**_

* * *

"_**I found you my lovely, in the depths of an ocean  
A story forever of hope and devotion…"**_

_-Sleepthief_

.

* * *

It felt oddly anti-climactic after all that had transpired, but at a loss as to what else to do, Jane struggled to her feet and made her way out of the alley, intent on finding her way home.

Everything hurt. The adrenaline that had kept her going through the battle against the mark had burned away, and her body let her know that it was exhausted and injured. Her shirt was blood-stained and torn and her arms and torso were covered in bruises, scrapes and scratches from her escape from the mob. Her muscles ached from running so far so fast, and protested as she moved. Her face felt like a mosaic of different kinds of pain, aching, stinging, stabbing, throbbing. Her cheek was swelling over the bone where the butt of the gun had hit her. As she crept warily towards the end of the alley, all she wanted out of life was two aspirin, a hot bath and a solid week of sleep.

Those luxuries would have to wait. The past few weeks were a blur in her memory - too much like the blur of being influenced by the Aether for comfort – but when she isolated little snatches of time, and recalled how she'd treated Erik, Thor and especially Darcy, her insides knotted up. She had phone calls to make.

When she peered out on to the street, expecting to find herself in some unknown part of the city, her jaw dropped in disbelief. She was only a few blocks from her lab. Just up the way she saw the shop were she'd bought her coffee earlier; the park she'd been looking for was just around the next bend. How could she have been so confused that she couldn't find her way from here?

_Because the Tesseract wanted me to be lost. _

She shivered, grateful all over again that it was gone. She still didn't understand everything that had happened today, to her or to the people around her. How could the Tesseract _do _something like that? _And what else can it do…? _It was becoming all too clear why an intergalactic battle had been fought over it; there was no telling what that kind of power could do in the wrong hands.

Refocusing on her surroundings, Jane searched for signs of the mob, for people acting strangely or for any disturbance the Tesseract's phenomenon might have caused. She was mildly astonished to find that there was nothing to see. At a glance, the street and its denizens appeared to be going about their day, seemingly unaware that anything unusual had transpired.

Tentatively she stepped out onto the street, clinging to the shade this time rather than running for the patches of light, conscious of her appearance, and unable to quite exorcise the memory of the hostility she had encountered here not an hour before. The influence of the Tesseract seemed to have faded like a bad dream, but too many of her nightmares had come to life recently for that to mean much.

She stopped short when she saw the car that had almost hit her, still idling in the middle of traffic. There was a police officer standing beside it, talking with one of the shop owners from across the way. The man was scratching his head with a perplexed expression on his face, while the officer shot him skeptical glances over the top of his notepad. Jane's stomach clenched. What if people recognized her, and still thought she had tried to steal the car? How would she explain any of this to the police? Jane ducked her head and hurried around the corner, away from the scene. The magic was gone, the people around her were back to normal, but there was no knowing how much they remembered or what they would do if…

"Oh my goodness!" a voice exclaimed as she passed an open shop door. Jane jumped and cringed as a thickset older woman all but exploded out of the doorway towards Jane, a broom in hand.

"No, please, I'm not…!" Jane heard herself stammer, cringing away from the coming blow.

The broom clattered against the storefront a moment later, discarded by the shopkeeper, who descended on Jane, her hands fluttering around her like moths around a streetlamp as she gaped.

"Oh my poor dear!" the woman cried. "What on earth happened to you? Are you quite alright? Should I telephone for an ambulance? Or the police?"

"No! No I… I'm fine," Jane sighed, nearly dizzy with relief. _The magic is gone. _"I just need to get home."

"But your clothes! That bruise! And your forehead… my girl, you have cuts all over your face!" the woman cried.

That brought Jane up short. Did she? She reached up to touch her forehead, and hissed in pain. With the blue fire and illusions gone, she could feel the raised, angry edges of _uruz, _bleeding and inflamed with no magic to soothe it. But it wasn't the only damage, and the torn flesh was still weeping blood_. _

"Here now, if you won't let me call anyone, at least come inside and wash yourself up!" the woman fussed, bustling Jane through the door of what turned out to be an antique shop, and back behind the counter into a little bathroom.

Jane gasped and winced when the light flickered on, and she saw her face in the mirror.

There was _uruz, _red and livid and bleeding above her left eyebrow.

And carved into the skin above the right, equally angry and bloody, was the rune, _sowulo_, the healing sun.

.

* * *

_It was impossible. No matter how many times he replayed the facts in his mind as he stood in the dusty shadows of the storage room, it remained so._

_Loki was a master of magic; in a world that valued physical strength and physical skill, he'd dedicated himself to the mastery of the light and energy, and in the shadow of his red-cloaked father and elder brother, he could never have afforded to be anything but the best. He had searched long and hard for a way to unbind the threads of the Tesseract influence; if a way existed he would have found it. Jane was remarkable, brilliant, wonderful… but despite everything, she didn't even _believe _in magic. What had she discovered that he had missed?_

_Turning inward, he examined the new emptiness inside him. He could see the mechanics of what she'd done – turning the Tesseract's own properties of reflection against it. It was true that Jane alone, having fascinated the Tesseract so completely, was the only one who could have done it. She'd been innovative to work it out, wise to pursue it, and possessed of a rare mental strength, to have pulled it off... _

_Perhaps if he hadn't been so blinded, so weak, so vulnerable and compromised when the Tesseract had drawn close to him… perhaps if he'd had her integrity, her goodness, her worth… well, perhaps he _might _have found a way to do what she had done. In theory. On a good day. After a fortnight of practice. _

_Jane had done it in an instant, without any practice, and no magic to back the strength of her conviction. Mere words or thought should not have been enough to force the Tesseract in a new direction. And setting that aside, it was particularly impossible that she had removed the tangle of its web from _him _as well. Jane was mortal, she had no magic of her own to make a new spell._

_He simply couldn't see how she'd done it. And yet she _had_. So how? _

_His thoughts drifted inevitably from Jane's coup, to Jane herself. Despite his confusion, fierce elation and glowing pride sparked a warm glow inside edged with burning curiosity. And an almost ecstatic sense of relief. He was free. But what was more, so was she. Of all the evil he'd done, all the honor he'd sacrificed, all the pain and degradation he'd endured, all the fear and sorrow he'd sown... all the lives he'd shattered... To know that hers would not be among them nearly drove him to his knees.  
_

_The memory of her piercing gaze, so knowing and defiant, glinting with that thrilling, willful gleam from the center of the whirlwind, drove the breath from his lungs as his eyes fell closed. She so terrified and excited him. He smiled softly. _

_"I don't suppose you'd tell me if I _asked, _would you?"_

_He chuckled quietly and shook his head, unaccountably embarrassed by his display of happiness. He opened his eyes and furrowed his brow, sobering. How long had it been since he'd laughed? Not deviously or maliciously or affectedly… just laughed because he was happy? _

_His vision blurred again. He scowled and swiped distractedly at his eyes. Hiding in a dusty closet, weeping like a woman; if only Father could see him now... _

_His fingers came away bloody once more. Frowning at the crimson stain, he waved a hand, conjuring a mirror. His breath stilled in his chest and eyes widened as they fell on his reflection._

"_Gods, Jane…" he breathed, reaching up to touch the bleeding cut on his forehead. _

_A cut in the shape of the rune, _sowulo_. The healing sun. _

_A mark of magic. _

_Not his mark; Jane's mark; the mark she'd claimed for her own. He shook his head. More and more, it was impossible. _

_It _should _be impossible._

_Unless…_

"_Unless… oh..." he murmured, his face smoothing as a wild, wondrous, painful idea occurred to him. "That… might explain it..." Which meant...  
_

_New possible truths gave rise to exciting new possibilities._

_It could explain why the Tesseract was so stubbornly drawn to her. And how she'd overpowered the Tesseract; how she'd marked him with a rune from the other end of Yggdrasil; even why her experiements with the medicine he'd given her continued to fail..._

_"So... that's it..."_

_Jane truly _was_ the key to everything. Now more than ever._

"_As it should be__…" His lips quirked in a pained, smug little smirk as his heart swelled with wonder and bittersweet longing until the very thought of her, without having her at hand to fold into his arms, was nearly unbearable. Fresh in his memory he heard her condemnation. _

"This isn't love…"

"_You're wrong," he murmured, closing his eyes as he pressed his hand to the ache in his chest. "If this is not love, nothing is…" He opened them again, staring sightlessly into the middle distance as his mind raced. "But you're right, it isn't enough," he conceded, nodding his head faintly, the little smirk that curved his lips wet with a fresh set of tears. "It will never be enough. Satisfaction is not in my nature, and enough is not the same it was before…" His throat closed against tears, but they came anyway. "Jane…"  
_

_There, in the dark and quiet of the store room, truly alone and rejoicing in it, Loki allowed himself a moment to weep, unabashed, as he faced the pain of loving her, the bittersweet ache of being without her, and the gratitude that she had, once again, saved him and set him free._

_And lit his path forward. A light in the dark._

_Gathering himself, he waved away the blood and tears with a whisper of magic, and, with infinite regret, healed the cut on his forehead, banishing the evidence of her blessing. A moment's thought and a shimmer of green energy replaced the mantle of his illusion, and he took up the king's spear once more and stepped from the store room to ascend to the golden throne, the very image of Odin Allfather. _

_Breathing deep, the king reclaimed his golden seat and clanged his spear against the floor to summon the guard. The doors swung hesitantly open, and a wary Halvard peered around it._

"_My king?"_

"_You will take a message."_

"_To the perimeter guard, sire?"_

_ The question brought the king up short. He thought of the explosives he'd seeded through the perimeter and the detonator secreted in his cloak. Of the flashing golden drops falling like rain into the abyss…_

"_No…" the king said, reached up to stroke his beard thoughtfully, then shook his head. "No, I think not." The warriors would stay where they were. "You will carry a message to the Nethermount. Go to the Archive, and summon Amundson. Tell him…" The king paused, thinking hard, then nodded to himself, his eye flashing with a gleam of anticipation. "Tell him to prepare to receive a new scholar into the Order of the Archive."_

_._

* * *

"So, you're sure you're cool now, right?" Darcy said for about the fiftieth time, giving Jane another skeptical look, which by now, Jane thought, was mostly just to irritate her. "Because I think I could make a solid case for emotional distress. Get some workman's comp out of it."

"Your investment in our partnership is touching," Jane deadpanned, rolling her eyes, then shooting Darcy a pleading look. "I really am sorry. I was… distracted. Really, _really _distracted. It won't happen again."

"Pinky swear?"

Jane raised her eyebrows and offered Darcy her pinky finger. Darcy pursed her lips and held out her own, then drew back at the last moment, eying Jane critically with a glint of teasing in her eyes.

"I dunno…"

Jane rolled her eyes and snagged Darcy's finger with her own. She felt a pang of relief when Darcy relented, grinning unrepentantly at her.

"Alright, deal," she pronounced. "You are hereby forgiven. But hey, can Ian and I still go on dates in your mom's apartment if we promise no more property damage?"

Jane screwed up her face.

The last time she'd left Darcy and Ian alone in her lab, she'd returned to find the place mildly demolished. Jane had no idea what they'd been up to, but the coffee table had been broken, the area rug had been rolled up against the wall, even though none of the furniture had been moved, and the sludge crusted inside the microwave and the chemical burns on the bedsheets had convinced her that she didn't want to know. Looking back, Jane was disturbed by how little relevance she'd assigned it in her own mind at the time, her preoccupation with the Tesseract superseding all else, but Darcy had assumed, after a few evasions from Jane, that that had been the reason for Jane's outburst. Jane let her believe it. Difficult as it was to keep things from Darcy, it was a lot easier than explaining the truth.

That didn't mean she was going let it happen again.

"Pretty please?"

"Um… no."

"It's just so much bigger and nicer than his place. And cleaner than mine."

"No."

"I'm going to unforgive you."

"Just go boot up the data analysis program."

"Yes, Czar Jane. Whatever you say, Czar Jane."

Jane grinned at her intern's retreating back as she plodded back to the computer. If she was complaining this much, her behavior of the past weeks was already water under the bridge. A relief on several levels. She couldn't stand the idea of Darcy holding a grudge against her. And she was going to need her help to start up her astrophysics research again. The Asgardian ointment was still a major curiosity, but with her head clear at last, the data from the Convergence was practically reeling her in on a hook, and she refused to put her life on hold any longer. The Tesseract's magic was gone, so Loki would make his move in his own time, or he wouldn't. In the meantime, Jane chose to get on with her life.

Part of that was putting the events of the past weeks firmly in the past.

Jane had used the Asgardian ointment to heal her injuries, including the cuts on her face. No scar or trace remained of either _uruz _over her left brow, or _sowulo _over her right. The magic was gone, and so were the cuts… but Jane could not forget the deep tunnel into the depths of her mind that she had seen in her dreams and in the vision that day. And that it corresponded to other changes in her body and mind that were deeper and less visible. What that might mean for her remained to be seen.

Loki's secret remained safe. That, too, was part of the choice to get on with her life. Yesterday when she returned home, she had had every intention of sitting down and telling Thor the whole story. He'd stood before her, smiling across the kitchen counter as he stirred the soup he'd cobbled together for dinner (much to his own amusement – doing these things for himself was still new enough to be novel). The words had been ready on the tip of her tongue.

And she had smiled back, and said nothing.

It wasn't fear that kept her quiet. Nor was there any guilt, confusion or ambivalence. It wasn't even hope. It was just the right choice. Rather than an act of trust, forcing the burden of her knowledge on Thor now seemed as though it would be more an act of selfishness, or even cruelty. It was easy to say honesty was always the best policy; but sometimes discretion was the better part of valor. She had no more desire to break his heart with the truth now than she had the first time she'd chosen not to tell him. There was no need to burden Thor with this now; she didn't need him to save her.

It was Loki that had saved her. He had protected her when she had faced a danger she couldn't recognize, and in spite of everything, he was the one who had provided her with the means to free herself. Loki was still a dangerous unknown. But for the first time since the night of the storm, there were no ghosts haunting her from the shadows. At last she felt safe, and she owed him something for that. She wouldn't reveal his secret… Unless it became necessary.

Especially when a chance might still arise for healing.

So when the moment came to tell Loki's secrets, she let it pass. And though she knew full well a day might come when she would regret her silence, this time the decision brought no conflict or unease; only peace. She had decided not to be afraid, and she was no longer running away.

Jane sighed and levered herself up off the couch in her mother's sitting room, intending to join Darcy in the home office to start running through the backlog on the scanners, when her cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her pocket, glancing at the screen. Her face stilled.

The number was Alexa's.

Jane bit her lip and took a deep, steadying breath, unaccountably nervous. She'd been ready to thank the woman in tears or bite her head off by turns. Now that the moment had come she didn't know what she would say. But it felt… important that they speak. She pressed the green button.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Jane," Alexa's ever-pleasant inflection sounded rougher and wearier than the last time they had spoken.

"H… hey, Alexa. How are you?"

"Well enough."

"Oh, good. Um…thanks for, you know… returning my call…" Jane winced, feeling awkward.

"The pleasure is mine," Alexa replied. "Truly, it is. I… didn't think I would have the opportunity."

Jane felt something inside her go quiet as the weight of the statement coalesced with the conversation she'd had with Jana. _"She can't return your call!"_ A cold prickle of retroactive panic shook her as she at last understood that Jana had believed that Alexa would _never _be able to return her call.

"You were there with me, weren't you?" Jane said abruptly, abandoning all pretense of polite conversation. "You put that mark on me, and you were there with me in the vision. Inside my mind…"

"Yes." Alexa said quietly. "We all were."

A chill shook her as she remembered the resentment and tears in the teen's voice. _"The adults are out right now." _ In her vision, there had been eight green lights in the water mirror…

Just how much danger had this family faced to help her?

"Are those kids okay?"

"They are perfectly well."

"And… are you okay? I mean… really?"

"We are…" Alexa interrupted herself with a rough cough, and when she spoke again, her voice was clearer. "…or will be soon enough. It was dangerous for a time, but Jana, whom you spoke with, joined us at the last moment. It seems she is... something special amongst my family. Her strength carried us through. If not for the bravery of my niece… well…"

Jane was speechless for a moment, overwhelmed, trying to decide what to feel. Gratitude seemed appropriate, and it was there. Relief as well. Confusion, certainly. She surprised herself by settling on anger.

"Why did you do it?" she demanded, trying to control her tone and only marginally succeeding.

"I told you, Jane. To give you a choice. A _real _choice; the one that was always there for you, but so close to your heart that it was hidden from your sight. I knew that once you discovered you had it, you would make the right one."

"But… but Loki… the guy you worship as a freaking _god… _I mean, he told you not to do it! And you told me you couldn't defy him. Why would you…"

"I broke no command," Alexa replied calmly. "The god told me never to step between you. And I never once did. We only reminded you to see yourself clearly. If you chose a different course than the god intended, that is entirely your doing, Jane, not ours. Our fight was with the Tesseract, not the god."

"Are you nuts?" Jane almost shouted, frustrated with Alexa's calm in the face of her outrage. She sucked in a deep breath and made herself resume a normal volume. "You… you could have died! Your kids would have been orphans! I'm a total stranger to you! Why would you go so far just… ?"

"Just for you?"

"…Yes."

There was a long pause, during which Jane got the distinct impression that Alexa was once again weighing her words very carefully.

"On this world," Alexa said at length, "we are all one family. We must… _all_ help each other if we ever wish to move higher."

"What?" Jane exclaimed. "Are you really trying to brush me off with platitudes? I'm serious here!"

"So am I. I am not brushing you off."

"Nobody is that altruistic," Jane groused.

"I never claimed to be altruistic, Jane. If that is what you heard, then perhaps that is all you are ready to hear."

"What are you…" Jane gritted her teeth and refocused as Alexa's rebuke brought her up short.

She took a deep cleansing breath, examining her own feelings, realizing they were blocking her analytical mind. Why was she angry?

_Those kids could have become orphans… for my sake. _

In her mind she flashed back to the day her father had died, and pain, unexpectedly strong and immediate, twisted through her chest to steal her breath. Tears pricked at her eyes, but she didn't let them fall. _Daddy… _She swallowed hard, then sighed.

Now that she could see the source of her anger, she could control it. She needed answers, and as in any scientific endeavor, the search for answers needed to be dispassionate and unclouded by emotion.

"Why are you doing this, Alexa?" she asked, proud of the calm in her voice. "What's your dog in this fight?"

"The Tesseract, of course," Alexa said smoothly. "I did exactly as the god, our sire, charged my family to do, and followed in the footsteps of my ancestor, to protect the universe from the Tesseract, to the last drop of Baldur's blood has ever been our mission. We did our duty."

"Uh huh…" Jane heard the words. And, very carefully, she listened for what wasn't said. "Except you specifically spared the children. You said yourself that you weren't sure you'd win, but you still left the children out of it. So it wasn't exactly to the 'last drop', was it?" Silence from the other end. "Maybe if your grandmother and her survivor's guilt had given me that answer, I'd have believed it. But not from you, who told me with so much regret that no on in your family ever had a choice, or about how you believed in your grandmother's choice to save her children rather than do her duty. So tell me why you _really _did it."

The silence on the line lingered for so long that Jane thought for a moment that the connection had been lost.

"I too have had to make choices," Alexa told her quietly. "Choices about whether to honor the sacrifices of my ancestors, or to honor the sacrifices of my grandmother. To follow duty or to follow my heart. It is a rare and happy circumstance when I am given the opportunity to do both at once."

"Do both…" Jane frowned. What was it with these people and cryptic riddles? "You mean, fighting the Tesseract… and protect the children?"

"Grandmother did more than protect her children," Alexa said, her voice soft and distant with something like hope, as though she were seeing something beautiful that was so far away she wasn't sure she would ever reach it. "She gave them a new life. A new way of living, new choices and new hope. What parents would do less for their little ones?"

"That's a lovely sentiment, but it isn't an answer," Jane reminded her flatly. "What has any of that got to do with me?"

"If you do not yet understand, then you are not yet supposed to."

"I might understand if you'd explain it to me."

"It's all a matter of perspective."

Jane was starting to get irritated again. This was getting her nowhere. She tried a different approach.

"Speaking of nonsense I don't understand," she muttered, "there was something Jana said… she gave me a message from you. But it makes no sense. What does it mean?"

"Repeat it to me," Alexa's replied, her voice sharpening abruptly.

Jane pursed her lips stubbornly, but did as she was told. For a memory from that stage in the Tesseract's mental invasion, it was unusually vivid; that whole conversation was crystal clear, while the memories all around it seemed lost in a bank of white fog.

"When the king's ward falls, you must not falter. You must stand strong and run for the edge of the world," she recited.

"Good," Alexa sighed.

"So what does it mean?" Jane asked.

There was a short pause.

"I… don't know," Alexa told her frankly, sounding slightly embarrassed. "But… I _do _know that it is important. Vitally important. Do not forget it."

Annoyance pricked at the base of Jane's skull.

Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open as the real significance of the other woman's words sunk in.

"This… isn't over, is it?"

The Tesseract's magic was gone, she was back to normal, and Loki had yet to show himself. Somewhere over the course of the past day and a half, she'd let herself be lulled into the delusion that things might return to the way they'd been before...

"It's never over, Jane," Alexa replied ruefully. "That's life for you."

"But… what… when… and how will I know…?"

"You will," Alexa replied simply, but confidently.

"How can you know that? How can you be sure?" Jane demanded of her, an edge of fear and doubt creeping into her voice. "Precognition? Foreknowledge?"

"There is that… though it is not nearly so useful as you might imagine. The Sight is like… like walking through a fog... you can see the shape of things as they loom closer, but you hardly ever know what it really is until it is right in front of you…" Alexa sighed, and Jane thought she heard an old frustration and resignation in it. "But no, that is not why I believe in you."

"I…" Jane frowned. "Then what?"

"Faith."

"Faith?"

Alexa made an affirmative noise. Jane pursed her lips. Faith. The answer didn't appeal to Jane in the slightest. She was a scientist. Her whole way of life was constructed around the search for evidence; she disapproved of belief without evidence on principle.

And yet… had she not made her own leap of faith in order to cast off the Tesseract's curse? Acknowledging it was somehow embarrassing.

"They aren't gods, you know," she said stubbornly. "Baldur wasn't a god. Odin isn't a god. Loki and Thor aren't gods," She didn't bother to keep the skepticism out of her voice. "Just because you believe they're gods doesn't change the fact that they're aliens."

Jane expected a protestation, or denial, or maybe a placid disregard of her disbelief. She hadn't quite expected the quiet chuckle that echoed over the line.

"Faith isn't about the gods. I thought you'd realized by now." Jane thought she could hear a smile in Alexa's voice, not that overly friendly salesman's smile, but a real one. She wondered what it looked like. "Faith is about what's inside of us. That's why it's so powerful. Because it is a choice."

.

* * *

_"Allfather!"_

_ The king turned, surprised, yet not, as Amundson stormed along the colonnade towards where the king stood with several red-clad battle masters, his tri-color robe and cloak flapping to reflect his fury._

_Below the peristyle surrounding the lower sparring arena, where the grizzled old warriors were outlining their plans for the education of the incoming batch of new recruits, the fresh-faced young trainees lined up with varying degrees of discipline. Each would be at least forty years old, still veritable children; it was the soonest Asgardians were permitted entry into ranks of the Einherjar, and their training would last another thirty years at least before they would be permitted to apply to the Order of the Archive, if they desired to pursue mastery._

_The king narrowed his sharp eye at the approaching Master of Masters, irritated, but not irate. Not three days ago, still under siege by the blue flame, this kind of public disrespect would have left the king furious and disquieted under his mask of authoritative calm. Today, he found himself able to look past his swell of annoyance to analyze the situation, taking in the shocked expressions on the faces of the trainees, and the grim, set of the battle masters' jaws – all directed at the newcomer. The damage done to his authority as king by the outburst was mitigated extensively by Amundson's embarrassing lack of decorum. Instead of fighting fury, the king had to work from keeping a smile off of his face. The man really was beginning to forget himself. _

_ "Master Amundson" he replied, showing himself unimpressed with the sour expression of outrage on his visitor's face. He nodded to the battle masters, indicating his approval of their report, and they fisted their hands over their hearts and withdrew into the arena to begin barking orders at the younglings. "I expected you yesterday. Come, let us leave the warriors to their work."_

_ Without waiting for a reply, he turned and swept up the nearby stair, Gungnir thrumming quietly with power each time it tapped against the glittering white granite. He stopped on the second tier balcony, standing at the rail to look out over the training, waiting to see if the Master of Masters would come to heel like a good dog. A few moment later he did; a petty victory for the king, but the privacy was preferable, and it was satisfying nonetheless._

_ "Allfather, what is the meaning of this… this absurd suggestion your retainer brings me?" Amundson demanded as he halted beside the king. He was breathing hard; the king wondered wryly if, in his outrage, he'd run here all the way from the Hinge._

_ "It was not a suggestion, Master Amundson. It was a command."_

_ Amundson's face was nearly purple with outrage. The king wasn't sure whether it stemmed from the misuse of his title, or the audacity of the order. Either way, the king had to work hard not to smirk at the sight of it._

_ "This… command…" Amundson made a visible effort to comport himself, "cannot be but jest, my liege. It is… it is _not _done."_

_ "There is a first time for everything," the king replied airily, stepping away from the railing to pace in a wide, thoughtful arc around the King under the Mountain. Amundson turned with him, never giving the king his back; the king had no illusions that he did it out of respect. "This shall simply be one of them."_

"_Asgard is little known for its capacity to accept change, Allfather. The Gardener saw to that. On the contrary, this is the Realm Eternal. We have seldom had need of it."_

"_Yet every so often, there is no harm in it." _

_Amundson narrowed his eyes at the king. "How very true, majesty," he conceded, his lips turning up in something that the king supposed might generously be called a smile. "And yet, why her? And…" Amundson cast his eyes out towards the edge waters. Towards the observatory and the curtain of light where the two energy waves still clashed ceaselessly. "… why now?"_

_ He looked back at the king, and their eyes met and locked. A wordless perception passed between them, and the air was suddenly thick with tension. Title and stations seemed to fall away in an instant, and they stared each other down, two predators circling each other. Both knew that the other was not what he seemed. Neither knew quite what the other was. Both determined to best the other, whatever the cost._

_ Three hoverboats zoomed by overhead, their prows glittering with Einherjar in full armor on perimeter patrol. It was a well timed and potent reminder – the king had not only the power of Odin's name, but the might of the Einherjar warriors as well. _

_Amundson need never know what a double-edged sword that was._

_ The king let his eye tighten at the corners with a mirth both dangerous and ever-so-slightly taunting. _

_ "A special dispensation has been readied for your chosen messenger," the king said, his tone deceptively conversational. "May I assume that my command will be carried out in a timely fashion?"_

_Amundson retreated behind the mask of the politician, his eyes growing cold and flat. For an instant – just the blink of an eye – the king felt a little chill of disquiet that he refused to call fear. His face curled once more into that false mimic of a smile._

_ "Of course, your will shall be done, Allfather," he said smoothly. "She is most welcome to come. She is even welcome to stay" The smile deepened and grew sharp with conceit and an unspoken threat. "That is, _if_ she can meet the standard."_

_ Once again without being dismissed, the Master of Masters turned on his heel – this time very pointedly giving the king his back – and swept away down the stair.. The king watched him go from the balcony, his robes and cloak flashing with red, green and blue like a horde of jewels in the sunlight before he disappeared into the far halls that led toward the main gate. _

_The king stared after him for a moment longer, then shifted his eye down to watch the clumsy forms the battle masters had begun drilling into the younglings. Someday, those battle forms would be crisp and exact, and second nature to those young men, written into their sinews as though carved into stone. In the heat and fury of battle, they would explode along muscle and vibrate through the bones without thought, natural as breathing, and waves of enemies would fall in their wake. _

_It was hard to imagine, watching them now. Had he ever been so young?  
_

_The king raised his eye to trace the faint halos of the stars in the blue dome of the sky. Was this wisdom or folly? Was it beneficence that moved him, or selfish desire?  
_

_He hardly knew. And it hardly mattered. Either way, he would not turn back now._

_With a sigh, he turned and made his way down to the main level and out through the vaulted glory of the barracks hall. _

_._

* * *

_In the black of the weapons vault, silence lay heavy against the gold and stone. Time had no meaning in the shadows. And it had no meaning at all to the blue spider sitting, hungry, at the center of its web. _

_It had been so close. So close._

_It felt that shift in the wind and power. It felt its prey slip its bonds, though the explosive burst of it was but a whisper by the time it reached it, a tremor to rock the web's knotted core. It felt the slave who was a king shaken free as well. With that, it lost its last mooring, and its last reflection. It was cut loose to drift in the cosmic abyss of space and time, reaching for everything and touching nothing. Alone._

_Its hunger began to fade. Time had no meaning, and form almost as little as time. It knew now how to covet, and how to weep. But in the growing cold and incoherence of its dispersing form, it learned to fear. And through fear, to hope._

_Dissatisfied with its own dissolution, it reached out and plucked one silken strand to vibrate out, out, out into the void, before the endless homogenous mass of matter and energy in which it languished lulled it back to sleep. Out to where one still knew how to listen for its call._

_And in the depths of the void beyond the edge of the World Tree, something stirred in response. _

_That something turned its glittering blue eyes across the expanse of space, to light upon the Realm Eternal. Upon mighty Odin Allfather, defender of the Eternal City, sitting unassailable upon his golden throne, his great citadel and host of Einherjar warriors a bastion of impregnable strength. Upon the wall of verdant light and incalculable power that held the penetrating forces of its attack ever at bay. And upon the undulating mass of all-concealing shadow that writhed somewhere beneath the throne, untouchable so long as the Allfather stood watch over it. _

_That one was not caught in the spider's web; it knew the weave, and how to walk the silk, for it dared not become so. It rivaled the blue spider, even as it desired it, and knew secret paths into its inner being. It would have it, and rule it, and offer up the destruction it would wreak to Mistress Death herself._

_Silently, it coveted. Patient as the spider, it waited.  
_

_._

* * *

_The king climbed ivory stairs and meandered without any particular destination in mind through winding corridors of marble and gold, until he arrived at the main promenade and stepped out onto the Grand Balcony once more. _

_His feet carried him here more and more often. Here… and to his mother's standing stone. But that vista brought him little comfort, and a great deal of conflicted confusion; to his shame, he much preferred this view. He let his piercing eye sweep once more over the Realm Eternal, basking in the pulse and flow of its rhythm, the bittersweet longing to belong here as potent as ever, but tempered now with an even deeper shade of growing calm granted him by the new freedom of his mind. _

_Here was the world he would one day call home once more, if the gods were kind. _

_If his sweet mortal goddess was kind. _

_If he could make the right choices._

_He put Amundson's potential treachery from his mind for the moment, refocusing on more immediate subjects. On anticipation. Introspection. Longing. And hope. _

_At length, he pulled the detonator from his cloak, and opened his hand to stare down at it lying there in his palm. There lay the power to throw the realm into chaos and watch it burn. His safety net. The only power in this realm that belonged to him alone, and not to the face of Odin Allfather._

"_I am chaos. I am destruction. I am fear," he murmured to the empty air. "This… is who I am."_

_Those words, which used to pulse through him like the crash of a gong and shake him to his very core, rang hollow, empty of heat, bereft of meaning. All they sparked in him now was a creeping shame and a heavy sense of regret. A feeling of foolishness that he hadn't seen it before. _

_Jane's voice rang in the quiet of his memory, sweet and certain, a guiding light._

"What makes us who we are is our choices."

_He no longer knew who he was. Nor could he trust himself._

"_Not yet." _

_But one day, he would have to face himself, as he had told Jane she must._

_As Jane had. _

_As his mother had. _

"The trick is to be honest while seeking the best…"

_Doubtless Thor's voice had delivered those words to Jane, but it was his mother he'd heard speak through the sending when they left her lips. Guidance from the distant past of sun-drenched days when he could still see himself, and his path had been lit clear before him? Wisdom delivered now, down through the ages into the shadows, from his sun to his rain, his one guiding light through the blinding darkness?_

_Doubt assailed him. He was no longer a child basking in the sunlit lies of innocence. He was a Jotun, a murderer, a fugitive and a traitor. Could he ever be anything more than a villain? Was there a chance, however slim, that he could become a hero? He simply didn't know. He had been so long at odds with the spider's flames; he no longer had any frame of reference for who or what he really was. _

_But… he'd made a vow to his mother's standing stone…_

I will defend what you gave your life to protect.

…_and he couldn't linger in the shadows forever. One day, he would have to walk in the light again. Not Mother's light. Jane's. _

_And he had no intention of doing so in chains. _

_He stared hard at the little device in his hand, his best piece of leverage. This was his assurance against those chains. He had been so certain. As certain as he'd been about his solution to the Tesseract's attack. But now... _

_A fleeting shadow of uncertainty swept across his face. But in his faith in his beloved glowed like the sun whose sign she had carved into his flesh, and it was nothing but an echo slow to die._

"There is beauty and ugliness in everybody," _she had told him. _ "What makes us who we are is our choices."

_He had imperfectly trusted Jane, he now saw. He had imperfectly seen her. A light in the dark, she'd shone too brightly for him to see the true shape of her. Blinded by his own desire, refusing to look towards the light for fear of the shadows at his back, he had carelessly underestimated her, her strength and her wisdom._

"She is strong in ways you'd never even know," _Thor had said that day on Svartalfheim. Much as it galled him to admit it, his adoptive brother had easily seen what he had missed._

_He was not troubled by such a hindrance now. Despite the new clarity in his mind – or perhaps because of it – his faith in her ran deeper than ever. Like the sun rising over the world seems to dim the streetlights, lending depth and definition to the world below, so was he now beginning to have a clearer picture of his beloved. Still his goddess, she still shone as brightly as ever, but the growing light within his own mind gave him a glimpse of the woman behind the divine radiance. Showing him just enough to convince him that he must see more. To do that, he would have to draw closer. _

"_Nothing given by another is as strong as what we achieve for ourselves…" _

_He'd told Jane as much. Now, he must try to live up to her example.  
_

_He opened his hand wide and a blazing green flame ignited in his palm. He stared into its flickering depths. He had once wondered if Jane's love could make him worthy. Now he saw that it could not. Rather, it was his love for her that would make him strive to become a man that could deserve to stand in the light beside her._

_So, with only a moment's hesitation, he made a choice. _

"_After the rain comes the sun..." he murmured._

_He fed the detonator into the magic fire. It crackled, hissed, snapped and burned until it was eaten completely away. _

_The king blew out a breath he hadn't realized he'd held, banishing the flame. It was done. For good or ill, he was entirely in her hands now, and so was the future of Asgard. Maybe the future of all the realms. Unburdened by foreknowledge, she would be the one to decide the fate of them all. _

_That was his unreserved choice. And no matter what the result, he would count it as a good one. _

_It was a gamble, of course. But one he'd won too many times to be a fluke. She would not fail him; if anything, she would up the ante. So he would let it ride. _

_Now all that was left to do was throw the dice. _

_Any who observed the king in that moment might spy an uncharacteristic grin tugging at the corners of his mouth, lighting his wizened, white-bearded face with delight, and be amazed to see his sharp eye sparkle with a gleam of wicked mischief. And anticipation. _

_Because now, the game began in earnest. The broader danger as well. But therein lay the challenge, and therefore all the fun._

_This was going to be a merry chase indeed._

"_Well, Jane?" the king chuckled darkly to the breeze, his eye bright with challenge as his mind whirled with new schemes. "What will you do?"_

_._

* * *

**A/N: **"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." [Lao Tzu] A lesson long in coming for Loki, but maybe he's finally learned it. One can only hope, right?

Any predictions as to what's up Loki's sleeve next? And if so, any ideas about how he'll pull it off? Let me know in your review!

Next up, the last little bit of this story, and maybe if you're good boys and girls, I'll add a little excerpt from part III at the end.


	10. Chapter 10

**Disclaimer**: The characters and original story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe do not belong to me; this story is not for sale or profit.

**A/N: **Last chapter! I am powerless to express just how grateful I am to all those who have read this far. I hope you've enjoyed this second arc in the series (which I have yet to think up an official name for, so suggestions are welcome!). The third installment is in the works already, though there may be a minor delay in posting it, as I am currently studying to take the NCLEX-RN exam and need to concentrate solely on that until next week; don't you hate it when real life gets in the way of fan fiction?

Go listen to the song _Edge of Heaven _by Ace of Base, and its a nice bridge between the end of this arc and the beginning of the next. Enjoy!

.

* * *

**Epilogue**

**.**

* * *

_**Fire! I can see it burning so brightly  
Fire! I can feel it calling out to me  
And as the sun goes down, it starts to paint a picture  
Of an ancient town, so far away, across the endless sea…**_

_-Ace of Base_

.

* * *

Jane stood out on the balcony, staring up at the stars. They were faint and distant with the city lights burning all around her, but that was alright. It let her focus, not on those glittering diamond pinpoints, but on the vast black velvet blanket of on which they were scattered. The universe was so vast. Jane had spent her life studying it, shrinking it with new knowledge, exploring it through mathematical formulas, data feeds and the lens of a telescope. And still there was nothing so wondrous and humbling standing under the night sky, letting her imagination fall up into eternity.

Without meaning to, she caught herself wondering where in that endless black sea Loki might be right now.

"Jane," Thor called to her from inside the apartment.

With a final glance at the twinkling darkness, Jane walked back inside and curled up on the couch beside Thor as he switched on the news.

"…_turned themselves in to local authorities, claiming that an 'angel of death' had appeared to them and told them to do so," _the newscaster was saying. Pictures of men in mugshots were flashing across the screen as she spoke.

Jane felt her eyes pop wide. She recognized them.

"_An officer we spoke with reported that the men entered the station in a highly agitated state,_" the newscaster went on. "_One of the men is quoted as saying 'I saw Death, and she spared me.' The three confessed to a rash of crimes, including theft, arson, rape and murder. They have also reportedly provided information for the capture of a number of accomplices. No word yet on any further arrests, but police are investigating the leads. The suspects are currently being held without bond_."

"It's astonishing, the madness and depravity mortals can create within their own minds." Thor commented, seeming both fascinated and appalled.

Jane was tempted to point out that humans weren't the only race with criminals, but that made her think of Loki, so she very carefully said nothing. Instead she snuggled closer into the crook of his arm, stomach churning with an uneasy mix of discomfort, disbelief and a strange, guilty satisfaction.

"_In international news," _the newscaster was saying, "_the newly assembled UN committee for Earth defense has partnered with Stark Industries to begin work on the Project Fortress."_

"Ah!" Thor exclaimed, shifting so that he, and Jane by necessity, sat forward. "Here is the story!"

Jane pulled a face. "Are they really planning to build a wall around Earth?"

"Not a true wall," Thor shook his head. "An invisible force that will prevent spacial rifts from opening around the planet." He grimaced. "I confess I do not quite understand the details, but I am told it is not magic."

"It would be some kind of null energy field…" Jane started, then trailed off at the blank look on Thor's face. "Well, it would act like a wall," she said stubbornly, crossing her arms while Thor gave her a bemused expression.

The footage on the screen cut to the US Secretary of Defense, Alexander Pierce.

"_Sometimes swift, decisive action is necessary. After two hostile alien invasions in as many years,"_ he said, sounding both reasonable and regretful, as though it were all just too bad, but unavoidable; for some reason, Jane instantly disliked him, "_it's become clear we can't afford sit on our hands and wait for the next one. We have to act."_

"_Critics say the proposed measures are premature," _the newscaster added, _"and worry that Project Fortress might have unintended repercussions, both in unseen possible damage to Earth's ecosystem, and for potential diplomatic relations with extraterrestrial civilization seeking peaceful contact. We will keep you informed on the story as more information becomes available."_

"They're right, this is crazy!" Jane exclaimed, slashing her hand through the air at the television in a frustrated gesture. "Don't they understand that they're cutting us off from the rest of the universe? We're making contact with larger world, and what's the first thing politicians do? Put up a wall!"

Thor was smiling at her.

"So fierce," he said affectionately, reaching up to tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. "Formidable as any Asgardian maiden." He sighed. "I wholeheartedly agree with you. That is precisely why it is vital that I answer Tony's invitation," he added, his tone careful. "So that I may be the voice of Midgard's off-world allies."

Jane pursed her lips and looked away. Thor had told her this morning that he'd been invited by Tony Stark to Manhattan to act as a consultant on Project Fortress. She had not been pleased, but could hardly complain; after all, it wasn't long ago he'd sent her off to do the same thing. That didn't stop her from wishing she could.

"_Thor divides his affections…"_

Jane shook her head, banishing the insidious memory of those words, and the queasy sense of unease they left in the pit of her stomach. She was being selfish and ridiculous. Besides, she _wanted _someone she trusted to be there, someone with a level head and some measure of perspective, to make sure Earth's leaders didn't make the single biggest mistake in human history.

"You're right," she conceded with a sigh, offering him an apologetic smile. "So what do you plan to do? How will you get them to listen?" On the heels of that, another, more disturbing thought occurred to her. "And what about the Bifrost? I mean, they can't seriously intend to block off all contact with Asgard. They'd strand you here if they did that. Or…"

_Or will you leave if they go ahead with this scheme, rather than remain trapped here? _

Jane pursed her lips and killed the question before she could ask. She couldn't be that fatalistic yet. And truthfully, she was afraid she wouldn't like the answer.

"That does worry me," Thor admitted unhappily. "And that is why I _must _be there. Tony has an idea though. In effect, we must convince them to build a gate in their wall."

"I guess that's better than nothing," Jane mused dejectedly, shaking her head. "The very idea of building a wall around earth is still ridiculous though."

"Midgardians seem willing to pay any price for the illusion of safety," Thor agreed, "rather than face the truth of life's uncertainty." Jane cocked a challenging eyebrow at him, wordlessly demanding that he amend that statement. "Present company excluded, of course," he chuckled.

"That's better," she said loftily, though the little smile that tugging at her lips ruined the effect.

"But truly, it gratifies me that I shall have the chance to speak my part," he continued with quiet passion. "Many in the Nine Realms consider Midgardians to be ignorant and craven, mostly because you live such brief lives. But I have seen my own eyes the bravery and heroism of which Midgardians are capable. So perhaps your rulers need only the right example and proper counsel to become so. Perhaps I might impart some measure of Asgardian courage to them, and make them bold and wise as I know the can be."

"And don't forget humble," Jane rejoined teasingly. Thor flashed her a million watt grin full of teasing, but very little humility.

"I may even be granted the opportunity to assist with a secret sister project on which Tony is consulting," he continued, "Something called Project Insight. It is for the defense of Midgard from dangers within, as Project Fortress is to deal with dangers from without."

Jane nodded slowly, sobering. She hadn't heard about that one; it wasn't on any of the news circuits yet, and that made her uneasy.

She was still uncomfortable with this. There was no knowing how long Thor would be away in New York, or other parts of the world if necessary, fighting with words now instead of fists; SHIELD had made it diplomatically but abundantly clear that she wasn't invited. The thought of it left her dejected, but she wouldn't complain. She would try to focus on the good. Thor would be a strong, solid, grounding presence in the midst of these reactionaries. She would choose to trust him to do what was in Earth's best interest, and while he was gone, she would reward his faith in her by making real progress on her research. It wasn't perfect, but what ever was? She would just have to make the choice to move forward in spite of the difficulty, and make it work. Maybe she could even fight this nonsense about curtailing energetic space travel in her own way, by building her own Einstein-Rosen bridge using the data from the Convergence. It might be useful to Thor and Tony Stark's cause, a bargaining chip they could bring to the table...

As the first seeds of the idea began to germinate in her mind, they were knocked loose as a sudden thunderous roar rattled the windows, stealing her attention. Outside the building, the night sky was suddenly roiling with clouds, and the entire building seemed to shiver with the ambient energy gathering in the atmosphere.

"What the…"

Thor was on his feet before she could finish the sentence. Jane ducked instinctively as she heard the high musical whine of Mjolnir flying through the air from where Thor had left it by the balcony door. As it smacked into his hand, there was a flash of light and a metallic rattling of scales as his armor formed around him, long flowing cloak flowing out behind him like a red tide, just as the night sky through the windows flashed bright as day with a concussive stream of golden light.

The sight of him suddenly in full armor, a shining shadow framed in the light from the window, closed Jane's throat with foreboding.

"Stay here," he told her as he strode to the balcony door. Jane watched him step out and vault over the balcony rail to drop the three stories to the ground.

Jane swallowed her fear.

"Fat chance!" she muttered, turning and bolting for the front door.

She didn't bother with the lift, running down the stairs instead, so that she was out of breath when she hit the front door of the building at a run and burst through out onto the street to join the crowd that had gathered to gape at the spectacle before them. Jane shoved and shouldered past them until she burst into the inner ring of spectators, stumbling to a halt.

A circle of Asgardian knotwork had been burned into the pavement in front of the building. Thor stood at its center in all his shining otherworldly majesty. Before him, a dark haired man had fallen to one knee, hand fisted over his heart. His clothing was vivid forest green, the exact color that Loki always wore, so that for an instant, Jane's heart leapt into her throat. But no, she saw when the man raised his head, he was a stranger.

"Rise," Thor was saying as she pushed past the gawking spectators. "Do you bring word from my father?"

"I do," the newcomer said stiffly as he climbed to his feet. His eyes swept around the crowd, and stopped when they reached her. A chill went up Jane's spine, though she couldn't have said why. "But not for you, my prince."

The Asgardian strode towards her, reaching into the folds of his cloak to produce a vellum scroll held closed by a golden ring.

"Jane Foster, Science Master of Midgard, warrior of the Convergence and beloved of Prince Thor Odinson, " he addressed her in a booming voice with grand formality, though his tone was haughty and his eyes cool as he glanced her over from head to toe; Jane was suddenly extremely conscious of her frumpy oversized tee-shirt and bare feet. He stopped several feet in front of her. "I am Master Arild Olafson, a Magic Master of the Asgardian Order of the Archive. I bring word to you from Odin Allfather, and from Lorens Amundson, the Master of Masters."

He held the scroll out to her. Jane, still reeling from the unexpected arrival, had to work hard to keep from recoiling. Something about the way he'd extended his arm towards her had reminded her of a striking snake. But she refused to shame Thor by showing cowardice to his countryman. She stepped forward and took the scroll, running a curious finger over the velvety material and the ornate gold seal, glancing up at the Asgardian briefly, before quickly pulling the ring off and unrolling the scroll like ripping off a band-aid.

A smaller scroll fell into her hand; she caught it, but her attention was drawn instantly to the ornate script scrawled inside the first. Her eyes scanned the letter, and went wide.

"Jane?" Thor asked sharply, perplexed and sounding troubled. "What does it say?"

She looked at him, her lips parted in disbelief.

"It says…"

She glanced at Arild Olafson, who was regarding her with an expression somewhere between amused disdain and morbid fascination. He inclined his head with a smirk, confirming the words on the page.

"My lady, you are summoned to Asgard."

.

* * *

**End Part II**

**TBC in Part III:  
The Serpent of Eden**

.

* * *

**A/N: **Did I say the end? Hell no, now its finally beginning! *chafes hands evilly* I can't wait to get Jane to Asgard! She basically just got the Asgardian version of her Hogwarts letter, and I don't think its too much of a spoiler to say there's no way she will be able to resist... Any idea as to what Loki is up to? What could he have planned, I wonder? I'd love to hear predictions if you have them!

Thanks so much for reading! As a bonus, since you're all so awesome for sticking with the story, and since I have to take a short time off to submit to real world demands, here follows an excerpt from Part III: _The Serpent of Eden _(somewhere around the middle of the story, so beware possible spoilers!). I've had this scene written for months. Hope it whets your appetite for the upcoming sequel! If you've enjoyed the story so far, please keep an eye out for it!

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

**_._**

* * *

_**Excerpt from **_**The Serpent of Eden**_** (first draft, subject to alteration)**_

_** WARNING; may contain spoilers, read at your own risk!**_

_**.**_

_**.**_

_**Time! close your eyes, see dreams of tomorrow  
Time! the wheels are turning to eternity  
And as the darkness comes I start to see a picture  
Of a lonely man, so clearly now, reaching out for me…  
-**Ace of Base_

_._

_"But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die._ _And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods…"_

-Genesis 3:3-5  
_._

_._

_._

"I thought you weren't supposed to eat them..." Jane said warily.

"You," Loki smirked, taking a bite of the golden flesh. The scent that broke with the apple's skin was tantalizing. He chewed in a rather deliberate way before swallowing a shooting her a taunting look. "Not me."

"Why?" she asked, irrationally jealous as he took another bite. "No one will come here, no one will even talk about it, and everyone says not to touch the apples, but no one will explain _why."_

Loki shrugged, watching her with a teasing light in his eyes.

"Hmmm... Let's just say this is Asgardian food." He took another bite, and made a show of savoring the sweetness.

"Well you're not Asgardian any more than I am," Jane snapped. "You're a Frost Giant, remember?"

It was a petty, low blow, and she knew it and she instantly regretted it. As she watched, his gaze frosted over, and the look he shot her could have frozen molten lead.

"Yes, yes," he growled, suddenly snapping his wrist so that the half-eaten fruit sailed off into the trees. "How could I forget? I'm a _monster._ You're an _ant._ Nobody's perfect. Except," he said, a sour note in his voice, "for the high and mighty Asgardians. No wonder they don't allow the rest of us to come here to soil their changeless glory."

"They invited me here," Jane said, unaccountably defensive.

"And you see how well that has gone over."

"They're not all like that," Jane persisted. "Thor brought me here when I was attacked by the Aether. Without hesitation!" Though it was true, she hadn't exactly recieved the warmest welcome from the rest of them... what had Odin said? _She does not belong here in Asgard any more than a __goat_ belongs at a _banquet table..._

"Yes indeed," Loki spat, his voice ugly with bitterness, "and Odin brought me home from the Ice War, and Baldur had his mortal toy. It runs in their family to bring home strays as _pets_."

Jane opened her mouth, ready to be offended, then blinked and frowned, startled out of her darkening mood. "How do you know about Baldur and Stella Solberg?"

"Stella Solberg?" Loki cocked his head thoughtfully, the name rolling off his tongue as though he were testing the shape of it. "What a whimsical name; 'the star of sun mountain'." Jane glanced at him sharply, her brow furrowing. Her memory stirred with a sense of déjà vu. She had heard that somewhere before… "I know many things Odin would rather I didn't," Loki went on, distracting her. "Someday he may even have cause to swallow his pride and thank me for it. I hope he chokes on it," he added in a sullen mutter.

The almost-memory subsided, and Jane let it go, in favor of narrowing his eyes at him.

"You don't know anything about it," she insisted dangerously. "Thor brought me here because he cares about me. He loves me."

Loki's face lost its angry animation, falling into sober lines.

"Yes," he said plainly. "But not enough to put aside his Asgardian bride for you."

Jane looked away. "Wishful thinking on your part," she said stiffly, unconvincingly calm.

"No question," Loki replied instantly and unabashedly. "Even so, am I wrong?"

"I couldn't ask him to." She said the words just as she'd practiced them in the solitude of her rooms after the tears had dried up. But her voice came out choked, and she had to clear her throat several times, casting her eyes down to search the ground as though she might find the missing shards of her heart lying amongst the moss beds. "It wouldn't be fair. I won't live long enough for it to matter anyway. I will be long dead before the day of their wedding. We'll be together for the rest of my life... I've got no right to be jealous..."

She trailed off, unable to keep lying to herself out loud, and looked up to find Loki watching her intensely. His eyes had sharpened. She was unnerved by his sly, thoughtful expression.

"What if you weren't?" he murmured, so quietly she had to lean in to hear him.

"What?" Jane asked warily.

"You believe he loves you enough to sacrifice his honor and his vow," he said, his tone growing hushed. "Very well. Prove it."

Walking deeper into the inner garden, he reached up into the overhanging branches of the larger tree at the center, and very carefully twisted and pulled until one of the shining golden apples snapped off, the rustle of dark leaves casting dancing shadows along the knotwork patterns carved into the trunk.

Wordlessly, he stepped forward, and held the apple out to her. This close, Jane could see it was a darker gold than the others, somehow more substantial, and its aroma was deeper and richer. As the light caught it, she saw, fascinated, that the patterns emblazoned on the trunk were present on the apple's contours as well, crisscrossing the skin in a paler shade of gold. Jane felt her mouth begin to water. She swallowed and made herself take a step back, out of temptation's reach.

"I shouldn't... I can't… Hilde and Finn said..."

"It may shock you to know that Hilde and Finn don't know everything," Loki said wryly, rolling his eyes. "It would certainly come as a shock to them."

Jane shook her head, her resolve faltering. "They said the apples are dangerous..."

"That's true enough. But _these_ are different, as you can see," he told her, rotating his wrist slightly so that the light of the crystals glittered off of the golden flesh of the darker apple. "This tree is special. I laid the spells into the trunk myself. The others might well be fatal to humans, but this one…" Loki's eyes swept over it like it was a thing of wonder, then back up to her, a conspiratorial half-smile curving his mouth. "...this one will give you the immortality of the Aesir. You could be with your dear Asgardian prince forever. Don't you want it?"

Jane lips parted without her permission, the sharp breath she drew flowing cold between them, her eyes wide and uncertain, flicking between him and the gleam of the golden fruit that called to all her senses like a siren. He held it out to her like an offering, but just out of reach, so that she would have to step forward and reach out to take it. So that she would have to make the choice herself.

For a dizzy instant, Jane was five years old again, and her grandmother was reading to her from the family Bible, the story of the Garden of Eden, of the serpent and the woman he'd led astray with a tempting fruit.

Her hand rose, drawing in to her chest to wrap instinctively around the rune pendant at her neck. Her heart was in her throat. She tore her gaze away from the golden apple and her eyes locked with his.

"Why?" she asked him, suspicious. "Why would you want to help me be with Thor forever?"

Loki held her gaze unwaveringly, but his eyes softened with reverence and longing. His other hand came up as he took a step towards her, reaching out as though to stroke her hair, only to recoil at the last moment, wary of the green lightning. As though she tempted him, as the apple tempted her.

"Forever is a long time, Jane," he said, bitterness creeping in to taint his coy expression. "And hope springs eternal."

Wordlessly he offered her the apple again.

After a moment, equally wordless, Jane reached for it...

.

* * *

_**Please stay tuned for more in the upcoming story, **_**The Serpent of Eden. _Thanks for reading! _**


End file.
